On the Flip Side
by T.S. Blue
Summary: The Duke boys live wild and carefree lives with only two natural predators: revenuers... and girls. Rated T for mild language and some roughness. Complete.
1. One Armed Bandits and Two Armed Girls

_**Author's note:** Hey there!_

_I'd warn that this one's odd, but by now that's like crying wolf. So I'll give you just-the-facts (and Enos would be so proud of me for that):_

_This is an alternate timeline story, another look at the question of "what if the boys hadn't gotten caught on that 'shine run." The last time I did this, it led to _Walking in the Shadows of a Past Reality_, with which I was not wholly satisfied. So this one is entirely different._

_The parameters this time were that it had to stick to canon as much as possible, while having the boys continue to run moonshine (and as an auxiliary, not be on probation and thus not confined to Hazzard). So you'll recognize a lot of the people as they come by, but they won't necessarily do or say precisely what you expect them to. (Because they can't. Because the circumstances have changed. Because I'm a fool with whacked out ideas.) It's been weird to write, so I am sure it will be weird to read._

_While canon events do happen, I did not want to just write canon all over again, so there will be places where it might help if you already know the series pretty well. I don't tell all the details of each episode, but I do go into the boys' heads in a way that the series never could. (Oh, and the boys have built the General and Daisy does work in the Boar's Nest. So while I stick to most canon, as usual, I dismiss _Happy Birthday General Lee_. For some reason, I never can reconcile myself to that particular history for the boys.)_

_Upshot: in order to understand what I am talking about, you may just have to read the story. I hope you will read it, and that you'll enjoy it. Cheers!_

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 1 - One-Armed Bandits and Two-Armed Girls<strong>

_Today:_

There's this: the girl, feet solidly planted and a smirk of superiority playing across her otherwise reasonably attractive face, the freckles adorning her nose stretching and merging with the contortion. Hand on her hip, the whole of her body an unspoken challenge and a boundary just begging to be crossed. Dust in the air, smell of sweat mixed with fumes and exhaust, and somewhere behind all of that, her perfume. Too sweet to be believed; no more real than anything else about her.

There's also this: a boy, improbably long-legged, mouth set in a manufactured sneer that carries no more veracity than the girl's scent. Like the barely pubescent brat that he was just a few short years back, he's pretending at a white-hot hatred for her, quite simply because her presence makes him warm – under the collar for starts, but it ends quite a bit south of there. Hot, flushed, sweaty palms leaving him clumsy and awkward. He wants her – to like him, to want him back with the same kind of instinctive longing that he wants her, to accompany him to public places where he can be seen in her company and private ones where he might be able to talk her out of her clothes. He steadfastly does not want to be mocked by her, to have her call his manhood into question. All the negative polarity of her angry and manipulative little soul pulls the beautiful blonde boy under her spell with a speed that he cannot, for all his racing experience, comprehend.

And then there's this: a car, startling power in its custom-built engine, growling in its guts with a ferocious urgency to help the foolishly smitten boy prove himself worthy of whatever twisted admiration this girl is capable of giving him.

Finally, there's this: the boy's sense-talking kin, utterly dismissed. Rejected, ignored and immediately forgotten, the years invested in keeping his fool self alive tossed aside like yesterday's leftovers.

* * *

><p><em>Yesterday:<em>

"Luke." He'd kept it inside long enough. There came a point when a man had to be honest, to speak the truth and take his lumps. "I got to tell you something."

Rolled eyes and, "You couldn't wait?" from over there in the passenger seat. Followed by, "Hold her steady, Bo."

But this was why he couldn't wait. Because it was inside him, had been stuck there for a whole day with no one else but him to bear it. Okay, at first it was nothing but the whine of a mosquito droning from somewhere in his gut. A tuneless song about time passing and a decision to be made and how he—

"Luke," he tried again, because his cousin was folded over the bench seat, reaching into the back for some fireworks or a weapon, and it wouldn't take him any time at all to find them. After that there'd be the climbing, slipping out of the relative safety of Sweet Tilly's cradling cockpit with nothing to hold him up but the night air and Bo's steady hand on the wheel.

Which wasn't likely to be steady, considering the way that the harmless mosquito had started eating away at his insides, gnawing for all it was worth, leaving him itchy and twitchy and nervous.

A low chuckle and Luke was back beside him, sitting properly. Whatever he'd fished forward from the back of the car seemed to please him inordinately. "Andy," he mumbled, and then there was a hiss and bright flash – a match getting lit. "You're going to wish you stayed in bed."

"Luke, dang it," Bo protested. Because it was one thing to imagine himself running Sweet Tilly into a rut and dislodging his cousin from his perch on the windowsill or the black matte finish of the roof. It was enough to worry about an errant spasm in his fingers hurting Luke, he didn't want to picture the both of them careening off the road because his dare-devil cousin had gotten overeager and lit the wick of a quarter stick of dynamite in the car instead of climbing out to where he could lob it, first.

_Stop_, he wanted to say, _and __listen __to __me_. But the sizzle of flame next to him seemed to indicate that there were better courses of action. If only he could figure out what they were.

"Hang on, Bo," Luke answered, then leaned out the window – halfway only, and Bo would be grateful for small mercies if there weren't so many dangers surrounding them. The way the road was narrowly etched into the mountainside, for starts, and then there was the revenuer nipping at their tail feathers. The fireworks in Luke's hand and that thing itching and burning inside his belly, begging to be shared.

A cough from his cousin and then a left-handed lob. Squeal of tires behind and old Andy Roach's car skidding to a sudden halt. And Luke's voice, close again, "What're you waiting for, Bo?"

What was he waiting for – well. It all started with indecision, he guessed. Wanting two things when he could only have one, trying to pick and it wasn't fair. Because there was family and then there was love, there was the farm and there was his future. There was the only home he'd even known and one place he'd ever considered living, and then there was that other thing. The way his heart raced, and his mouth just kept on spilling out fool words because his brain couldn't keep up.

"Go!" Go. Yeah, he could do that.

"I'm leaving," he blurted.

"What?" came back at him, but Luke wasn't really listening. Too busy sliding and shoving his way into Bo's half of the moonshine runner's seat, foot encroaching on Bo's space. Left foot, used to mashing down a clutch with full force. Car lurching forward with all due speed – whiplash of overcompensation and it was hardly moving at all but Luke was still coming, still shoving himself over to try to get his right foot on the gas pedal and—

"To Macon." The leaving thing, seemed like he'd better explain it. Since Luke was crowding into his seat with him and all, taking over the driving like he thought Bo was about to slip out the door and disappear right now. "With Jill."

"Bo." Harassed, annoyed, one-hundred percent Luke Duke on a mission with his silly little cousin in the way. "Move."

Move. Yeah, he was planning to do that, planning to move right on out of Hazzard and everything he'd ever known. Into a city with the one girl who had ever been able to spook and scare him until the hair stood up on the back of his neck, who'd been able to unnerve him and uproot him and spin him around faster than a bootlegger's turn on a switchback road. And yeah, he wanted Luke's blessing. Or not that, because he couldn't imagine it ever being given. But he wanted peace between cousins, wanted to know that even if Luke didn't approve of his decision, there'd still be that undying support between them.

He didn't want or expect Luke to be in such an all-fired hurry to get rid of him that he'd be pushing him out the door. Or up against it.

But then it changed. Not so much shoving as slipping, lifting, sliding, and then everything was heavy cousin, halfway in his lap. Elbow in his chest and boot heel stomping down on his toes, fuzzy hair in his eyes and his mouth and a quiet syllable of pain that could have been uttered by either of them. Luke had lost weight in the service that he still hadn't gotten around to gaining back, but he was dense and solid and squashing Bo in his eagerness to be rid of him.

"Luke," was a natural response to being crushed into the seat, and if it came out a little constricted, that could be blamed on the fact that he could barely breathe.

"Bo," came snapping back at him, all frustration and annoyance. This here was Luke Duke giving an order – one he wanted obeyed regardless of the way he was smothering the person he was ordering around. "Get out of the way. Andy ain't going to stay put forever."

Andy? Oh, right, Andy. This was what came of letting mosquitoes chomp away at his insides, of keeping his thoughts and plans to himself instead of sharing them with Luke. Here was his brain, all tangled up in Jilly Rae Dodson (just Jill now, long legged with hair the color of fresh cut straw, kisses doled out sparingly like well-earned prizes for withstanding her resistance, her soft fingers tilting his chin how she wanted it while her other hand stroked from elbow to shoulder and back, exploring his farm-grown muscles), while Revenue Agent Andy Roach still lingered in their rear view mirror as Luke fought inertia and the weight of a fully loaded moonshine runner to get them moving – at high speed – the hell out of there.

"What," Bo asked, his survival instincts catching up with the situation. _Priorities, __Bo_, his cousin might have mocked with a smirk, that was if he hadn't been so singularly focused on jamming himself into the driver's seat. _I__'__ll __get __around __to __killing __you __for __deciding __to __run __off __with __a __girl __once __we __survive __this __run. _"Did you throw at him anyways?"

"Bo, move over." Over, move over. Not out, but over. Into the passenger seat—yeah, he could do that. Not easily and not without making Luke kick the accelerator too hard then release it again, not without bumps, bruises and accidental scratches, but he could manage. Over, not out – no accounting for how the thought cheered him when he'd been in such a hurry to confess his intent on leaving home. "Wasn't nothing more than a smoke bomb, and we'll be lucky if it holds him for more than a minute or two."

His feet, at least, were out of Luke's way by now. Sure, his left leg was still hung up somewhere between here and there, falling asleep under the density of his farm-solid cousin, but Luke had a clear shot at all the pedals. No explaining why they were still moving forward in erratic fits and starts.

"You ain't," came growling over to him as Luke gave the road a dirty look - for being wet and curved, or maybe just for being there at all. Disappearing was that much easier when they were in the woods instead of on blacktop. "Got enough time to _leave_ or nothing, to run off to _Macon_ before he catches up to us."

Or maybe the glare was for him, just temporarily directed at the road considering his cousin did have to pay attention to what he was doing and all. Because there he was, the unflappable Luke Duke – flapped, flustered, frustrated. Surprised and not liking it one bit.

"I didn't mean right now," Bo corrected. Just for the record. Typical of Luke to go thinking of him going off to Macon as some sort of a means to escape doing his share of the work. "I mean when she goes. Next week." And then because Luke was the absolute master of deliberate misunderstandings – he'd play at pretending you'd said one thing when clearly you'd meant another (and any jury would side with you) until he had wrangled out a confession of every niggling detail that he had no right to know – Bo added, "For keeps, Luke."

Oh, Sweet Tilly stopped bucking right then and shot forward like she meant it. As though she'd had no particular concerns as pertained to keeping the boys safe from a revenuer, but now that Bo had revealed his plans to leave town this thing was about to get _interesting_, and she reckoned she might as well give them enough time and space to fight it out. Their moonshine runner took after Daisy – content to be placid and pretty, unless there was some good gossip to be had.

But old Andy Roach, he didn't seem too intimidated by the way Tilly marred the pavement with heavy black streaks in her hurry to leave him behind. Seemed like the smoke had cleared and the revenuer's headlights were bearing down on their bumper again.

Tilly swung a hard left, and as his body got crammed up against the door, Bo heard the snort.

"When's the baby due?"

"Luke!" Bump as wheels spun off the pavement, and Bo's head just about rammed the roof. Which he wasn't thrilled about, but then again, he had more pressing complaints. "I ain't been with her that long."

Another snort as the wheel got cranked a hard right this time, leading them down an old deer path. At least that was what it gave all appearances of being, and apparently they had their daddies to thank for that little bit of deception. Family lore had Luke's father and his being two of the more clever moonshine haulers of their generation.

"It might take nine months for the baby to get born," was Luke, reiterating that little lesson on birds and bees that he'd first imparted some ten years back. "But they don't take that long to get themselves started."

"You would know," got him a dirty glare when Luke really should have been paying attention to the trail in front of him or the trees crowding in on either side, or maybe just the pursuing car that was showing no fear in following them right down into the darkness of Black Hollow.

His cousin never had much cared for the rumors that chased him through town and back out to the farm, the ones that got into Jesse's ears as easy as anyone else's, about how some of those kids in the orphanage had bright blue eyes that could only have come from one place.

"They ain't," got asserted at him once again, "mine."

"And Jill ain't got no baby in her belly. Watch that," tree, he might have said if he hadn't been so busy convulsively throwing his arm across his eyes and ducking. But there was no crash or bang, just bumps and Tilly's engine whining against the abuse. Low gear and loose dirt and, "Dang it!" low-hanging branches. "You ain't got to kill me."

"You can stop hiding," got groused at him from the driver's seat, but of all people, Luke ought to know better. About crazy cousins, fast cars and fool stunts that made perfect sense if you were the one behind the wheel. From over here on the right side of the car they gave every appearance of disaster waiting to happen, and Luke had spent too much time under the dashboard himself to be acting like Bo was a coward for trying to protect his skull from picking up a few dents. "And start figuring out how we get Andy off our tail."

Hindsight, he would admit, was a fine thing. Brought a useless kind of clarity to his current situation to recognize now that he should have held his tongue about Macon until after they'd managed to make this run, or at least dump the revenuer in the drink. Now that he'd gone and spilled the beans and upset the applecart, now that the natural order had reversed itself and Luke was driving, he'd gotten himself stuck with the thinking. Which he'd never much cared for.

"We got any more of them smoke bombs?" he asked. Seemed a reasonable request to him, but apparently Luke didn't think so, sparing him a sour look before turning his attention back to the trail in front of them. After all, there was an intersection ahead where wild hogs were known to cross the trail. Best to keep those glowering eyes facing forward in search of pigs.

"Do I look like I'm in the back seat, Bo? Ain't no way to know what we got unless—"

"I get my lazy butt back there. Right." Sometimes it was best just to agree with Luke, even if he was wrong. Saved time on pointless arguments. And if there was one thing they didn't have an abundance of right now, it was time. If they followed this trail out to its ending they'd find themselves smack in the middle of Route 221, across the Choctaw County line. No place to be with a revenuer – who could call in enforcements in the form of one Sheriff 'Hammerhand' Ragsdale – trying to drive up your tailpipe.

Crawling over the seat wasn't nearly as easy or fun as it used to be when he was a kid, but Luke managed to spare a hand off the steering wheel long enough to grab him by the belt and unceremoniously shove him the rest of the way over. To land face-first into whatever mess had already been stirred up on the floorboards back here.

Something… sticky. Paper. Popsickle wrapper.

"Luke," he complained, even though his cousin hadn't been known to eat anything close to an ice cream product in years. "I can't find nothing back here." Except this—what? A few ticks on the clock and the car went over a dip, allowing the revenuer's headlights to shine directly through the back window for a split second. Sock. That one could well have been Luke's so he threw it up into the front seat with his cousin. "It's a mess."

"Babies are messy, Bo." Dropped in just as casual as you please when they were nothing more than a scared rabbit on the run with a bobcat on their tail.

"I already done told you," a box of matches under his left hand – that at least could be helpful. Chucked it up onto the seat beside him and went back to searching for something that would whistle, bang, or otherwise distract the man on their back door. A full load of 'shine in their trunk, enough to weigh them down, then get them sent to prison for a good five years, and Luke was up there telling him things he already knew. "She ain't pregnant."

"Maybe not," his cousin agreed, and they bumped over something hard enough that Bo's head hit the back of the front seat. A root or stone, and maybe Luke was aiming at them on purpose with some misguided notion of knocking some sense into him. But his older cousin, for all his worldliness, had never loved a girl. As far as Bo knew, that was, and Luke was the sort that could keep a secret like a champ if he was of a mind to. But all his instincts told him that Luke guarded his heart pretty carefully and had never given it away. "But she will be. Won't be long, either." Which would have brought a sardonic smile to his face if he hadn't just felt something round and promising that slipped out from his fingers and rolled under the seat. "Girl like that, fixing up the orphanage before going off to some job in the foster care system in Macon? Wants kids, Bo. Lots of them."

And everyone knew that Bo Duke had no real use for anyone under the age of eighteen.

But he had plans for handling that, plans for how he'd convince her that spending her whole day wiping wet noses and cleaning up stinky messes was enough and she didn't need to come home to the same. Besides, those little foster kids needed her, and having her own wouldn't be right, considering. Because she couldn't work and raise kids both—

"And since you ain't the one with the job," Luke called back to him as his fingers closed around another object (their uncle would have their heads on a platter if he knew what a disaster they'd made of his prized car by using it for courting every bit as much as for delivering). Bottle, empty, could be useful so he kept that – "You'd be the one changing diapers all day." Dang it if he wasn't just plain sick of that Duke-cousin mind-reading trick half the time. Sure, it came in handy enough when they needed to pull the wool over old Rosco's eyes using nothing more than a raised eyebrow between them, but moments like now when Luke could not only follow along with his thought processes but jump ahead and lead them, well, he could do without their brains working in that sort of perfect synchrony.

"I reckon I'll get a job," if he managed to make it out of tonight's little complication with both his life and his freedom, that was. And he'd be doing a whole lot better at it if only Luke would stop slaloming through the trees (or maybe it was boulders or even pigs, though they had to be past that crossing by now).

"Sure you will," Luke contributed from his comfortable perch in the front seat. "Would you hurry up back there?" Yeah, he would. Had himself a fine idea now and all it would take was revealing the contents behind the plastic paneling that lined the seat back here. "Last I knew there wasn't no openings for moonshine runners in Macon." No, he didn't figure there were. And it was an awful shame, too, because he could see turning those unfortunate city cops on their ears if they decided to take out after him. Their whole careers spent driving straight roads with intersections at right angles, and not a one of them would be able to follow Bo Duke as he wound through them at top speed, not when he'd cut his teeth on serpentine mountain switchbacks.

A factory job, maybe. Both Duke boys had some small experience with that – a month here or there at the Hazzard Cotton Mill when the corn wouldn't grow or the liquor wouldn't sell, when times were lean and Daisy's paycheck couldn't stretch out far enough to reach all the corners of their lives – mortgage, electricity, food and gasoline. Hadn't ever been fun, but then they'd always been given the heavy jobs, lifting and toting because they were big, strong farm boys and sod busters besides. The sort that had no long-term prospects, figured to be slow learners and strictly temporary besides, so their brawn was useful, but not their brains.

Or their real skills. Maybe in Macon he'd at least get to drive the forklift.

Of course, a big, strong sod buster like him shouldn't be struggling nearly this much just to pull some lightweight plastic paneling back to get at what was behind it. He'd only done it a hundred or more times before. Just never while the car bumped and jostled around him.

"I reckon I'll manage to find some kind of work, Luke." And finally, his fingertips wormed around the edges, the panel pulling free with a percussive pop. Made his cool cousin's head turn, the intensity of those blue eyes caught in the pursuing beam of Andy Roach's headlights as he tried to figure out what Bo was up to. "You just watch the road," Bo admonished. Dug out a jug of Jesse's finest from where it had been hidden, unsealed the cap. Yeah, what he was doing would mean delivering one open jug amongst the forty-nine sealed ones, and old Silas wouldn't much care for that. There'd be complaining and wheedling, but old Luke up there was a pretty slick horse trader when it came to these things. He'd work it down to a two-dollar deduction off the agreed-to price, and when you held that up against the prison time they'd serve if Andy caught them, well, he figured Jesse'd forgive his little indiscretion. "And anyways, Macon ain't that far away. I'll still come up here and show you how a real 'shine runner drives."

Hindsight again, having its way with him, laughing as the car caromed off to the left under his cousin's wide fingers and just maybe taunting Luke wasn't the wisest choice he could have made under the current circumstances. Not when he was trying to pour moonshine from a wide-mouthed jug into a narrow-necked old beer bottle without anything so useful as a funnel to make it reasonably doable. A splash of Jesse's finest lost to the vinyl of a back seat, and there went another two of Silas's dollars, dribbled away.

"How you going to get back up here?" Luke spat back at him, but at least Tilly was running smooth now. Almost as if she were on blacktop (and he'd better hurry his preparations along). "You ain't," in that barking, Marine Sergeant's voice, the one that couldn't be disobeyed, except when it could. "Taking the General."

Yeah, he knew that. Or he'd halfway figured it out, how the powerful car would get all colicky and queasy if he had to drive city streets on a regular basis. Heck, the engine had taken to sputtering after only a few hours in Atlanta last time they'd taken him there.

Didn't bother answering Luke back on that one – when a man was right he was right, and when a man was done transferring moonshine from one vessel to another (while sparing a bracing sip for himself), it was time to get back into the front seat.

"Where'd that sock get to?" he mumbled when he got there, legs splayed all willy-nilly, but his booty intact.

"I ain't go no idea," his answer came, but Luke's big old hand went pawing around the seat anyway until it found fabric, then tossed it over to Bo. Nasty thing, too, and nothing he had any powerful desire to be hit in the face with. Luckily he had good reflexes.

A few more drops of Jesse's nectar got splattered onto the knees of Bo's jeans (but that was just more moonshine under the bridge) as he doused the sock with his carefully garnered store from the beer bottle. Jammed the cloth into the short neck, kept out as much length as he could while leaving one end stuffed all the way inside to soak up the liquid. Wanted a long fuse.

Wanted, when it came right down to it, to be where Luke was, to let his cousin do what came next. Sticking to the slippery outer skin of a speeding car, lighting explosives and holding onto them far longer than made sense, waiting for the optimal moment to toss them, that was Luke's specialty and he had nerves of steel. Bo, he was much better at keeping the car steady, sailing along at a quick enough clip that the ground somehow evened up beneath the wheels, dips and ruts getting lost to the forward momentum, and he knew he could keep Luke safe no matter what fool stunt he had in mind to pull. Roles like that weren't meant to be reversed (and he wasn't just thinking that because it was his neck that stood a reasonable chance of getting broken).

But old Agent Roach back there was getting impatient, was savoring the taste of victory as he all but drove up through their back window while no doubt calling for backup. They were running out of trail and Route 221 loomed with the threat of Hammerhand—

"Be careful," came from his cousin; a moment of sincerity in the middle of a storm. "I got you covered." _I__'__ll __hold __her __steady __for __you, _and more than that_, __I__'__d __never __let __you __get __hurt._

Nothing for it, then, but to climb out the window with a makeshift weapon in his hand. To perform a precision operation, one in which he gave the revenuer behind them a little gift that landed close enough to scare him but not blow him to bits, because Jesse would tan their hides all the way to Yankee country and back again if anyone got hurt. Which meant no approximations or left-hand lobbing; to properly aim, he'd have to get a good portion of his body on the outside of the car. Handed the matches to Luke for safekeeping with no clear thought other than that he wanted one free hand to grasp the window frame as he climbed out far enough to crouch on the sill. Got his balance there then looked back to retrieve what he'd need. Saw his cousin opening the match box one-handed, then selecting a stick without his eyes ever leaving the path in front of them. Hiss of flame as he cracked the top with his thumbnail, then held it out. More silent words in that gesture – about how Bo could keep holding onto the car with his left hand, if only he'd put his makeshift wick into the flame Luke was offering. Two minds wrapped up together in one thought, one plan.

Took more time than he wanted to get the sock to catch (definitely Luke's then, too much time spent in contact with that contrary body of his cousin's, soaking up negativity along with sweat and refusing to do what would be most useful – just _because_) but eventually it began to smolder, then burn with a thick, black smoke.

Had to situate himself, to let one foot drop down to the stability of the passenger seat while the rest of him stood taller, up into the cool night air where the branches hung low, and he never had liked riding on the outside of a car half as much as Luke did. (_I __got __you __covered_ – Luke said it and Bo never doubted it was true.) Held onto his makeshift bomb as long as he could stand to, then let loose. Aimed it just above the ornament on the boxy hood of the Oldsmobile behind them, then turned around and slid back into the passenger seat in record time. Bang from behind before he could turn his head around – missed the white-hot explosion, but saw the headlights swing wildly, heard the crunch as good old Agent Roach got up close and personal with a tree. Felt a bump from Luke's right hand as it knocked against his arm, asking for a congratulatory shake before it had to return to the steering wheel. Thud as the trail ended in the asphalt of Route 221, and then there was the vertigo of a bootlegger's turn to head back the way they'd come.

"She ain't all that smart, Bo." Jill, apparently, and the Duke boys were going back over old ground in more ways than one. "And she ain't got no loyalty. She said she was here to help out the orphanage, but she's cutting and running the first chance she gets." Pause in Luke's meticulous listing of all of the poor girl's faults as they retraced their steps to pass Agent Roach's disabled car. The man was standing at his own bumper, watching steam rise from the hole in his radiator, shaking his head and hollering something at the passing moonshine runner. Head tipped laughter from Luke, and then it started up again. "You follow her off to Macon this year and you could be finding yourself in New York the next time she decides to take off."

Over Big Bend Ridge and down through Possum Hollow, across the wilds of the Cherokee Forest the argument chased them. All the way up to the delivery point where Luke slid him sideways glares as he talked Silas into the notion that the open bottle of 'shine was so the wares could be sampled, halfway had the man believing that the Dukes had always operated that way. Took the payoff, not even a dollar short of the original agreement, then picked up the argument with Bo right where it had left off as they headed back down to Hazzard. Still going strong when they got home to find Jesse sitting on the porch waiting for them – or maybe it was trouble that the old man could smell in the air.

* * *

><p>Circles, they'd gone around in enough of them over the course of their lives. Racing laps were preferred, gaining ground towards winning bragging rights and a trophy with each turn, but they'd done enough of this other kind, too. Pointless, just going over places they'd already been because there was no place else to go.<p>

Late-season bumblebees and slow-moving dragonflies dancing lazily at their feet, no ability to remember last week's cold snap, no concern or thought about the fact that their little lives had just about run their course. Bugs didn't plant or harvest, didn't make or deliver anything more potent than honey, didn't run afoul of lawmen or the pellet-filled shotguns belonging to daddies of teenaged girls, and they never, ever spent the afternoon walking in loops around a lake, trying to figure out what to say to heartbroken cousins.

"She was too skinny, anyways." Even the bees didn't like that one, sending a large emissary to buzz close to his left ear.

"Shut up, Luke," Bo mumbled. Again, really, because he'd been saying that to every one of Luke's attempts to make him feel better. But he stayed close, stayed warm where their shoulders bumped as they walked. Stayed focused on the grass beneath them and the foolish insects that lacked the sense to realize that Thanksgiving was just around the corner.

Jesse had not, as anyone with half a brain would have expected, sided with Luke in last night's argument. Equal dark-eyed glares had been leveled at both of them. For fighting, for leaving a revenuer locked in an embrace with a tree without calling in a wrecker to help him, for spilled moonshine and shady negotiations, for anything at all. But not for Bo getting the fool notion in his head to follow off after a girl, not that. Because when it came time for Bo to confess to what they were squabbling about, the old man had gotten a wistful look in his eye, then calmly sat them down. In the kitchen, where civility reigned, because once upon a time, their Aunt Lavinia had insisted on it. Nothing but perfect manners at her table, even if the rest of the house had been a cacophony of disputes. The living room, for example, was a comfortable place that invited thumbed noses and kicked shins – accidentally, of course – in the process of settling into the easy chair or couch. The straight-backed, hard-bottomed kitchen chairs made a man sit up properly and face his foolish deeds.

"Do you love her?" their sage old uncle had asked, all dreamy-eyed with hope. As if it might be his fondest dream for the blonde fool in front of them to fall over himself with giddiness over a girl. Like love mattered when Bo was talking about leaving home.

"I reckon," the idiot had answered, shifting in his chair, a twitch across his cheek, eyebrows down low and tight.

"You reckon?" Utter incredulity on Luke's part. "Bo—" and an old man bear-paw had gripped his forearm, hard. _Hush._

"There ain't nothing quite as nice as love." Stars twinkling in his old man eyes, and their uncle had been every bit as big a fool as Bo if he believed—"You got a ring?"

Oh, the lost look Bo's face had worn then: slack-jawed surprise, no words.

That same hand that had been squeezing Luke into silence moved to pat Bo on the shoulder then. "Don't you worry, boy. I've got just the thing." On his feet and out of the kitchen before Bo's open mouth could even get itself closed – for such a big man, their uncle could move deceptively quickly. Revenuers never expected it, either.

"Luke," Bo had managed, voice filled with dread, those deep blue eyes just begging – _help __me_.

"Here you go," and their uncle had come back, face just about cracked open in smiling pride at his sweet little boy, all grown up. "It's the one I gave your Aunt Lavinia when we wasn't a whole lot older than you is now, Bo." Gold glittering as Jesse had held it up and admired it – one last time – in the yellow light of their dim kitchen. "I always figured on giving it to Daisy to pass on to her children," because, as the old man had made clear only days ago, their female cousin was the only hope for the family line. Bo and Luke were fine as brute strength and tireless workers, not to mention delivery boys, but when it came to respectable things like marriage and children, Daisy was the one to place your bets on. "But, here you go." The ring, with its tiny chip of a diamond, had been laid into Bo's hand, which Jesse had proceeded to hold onto with both of his own. Those might or might not have been tears at the corners of his eyes. "Since you've got yourself a nice girl to spend your life with—Oh," had been a fresh inspiration, yet one more happy thought for an already beaming man, "you have to bring her by for dinner before you go. And if you saw fit to put this on her finger right here in this house, well it would be—"

"Jesse." Wretched, that was the way his cousin had sounded. "I—" No more words, but his eyes stayed fixed on Luke. _You__'__re __the __smart __one. __Get __me __out __of __this._

This, which was either a sweetly excited old man that was about to get his heart broken, or a fine, fine acting job. And his boys would never know which, because Jesse could shuck and jive the President of the United States into creating a Department of Moonshine Distillers and granting them full power to make their wares, if he had ever wanted to.

"Uncle Jesse," Luke had butted in. Because Bo over there had been drowning in the hopes and dreams of the man who had raised him. And it was, as always, Luke's job to offer him a branch to grab onto and pull himself to shore. "He wasn't really planning—"

"You didn't," and it had all changed on a dime right then and there. Where everything had been soft and dreamy, it all turned rough, hard, firm and there would be no wiggling past the law their uncle was about to lay down. "Think you was going to go down there and live with her without _marrying_ her first, did you?"

It was, Luke would have to admit, a decidedly direct route to convincing Bo that following off after Jill was a fool's errand. Worked perfectly, had Bo babbling and dismissing any notion of ever wanting to leave Hazzard. Had the boy backtracking all the way to last week, when he was ready to let Jill go, then further back than that. All the way to childhood, when he'd been too cute (and too deeply sorrowful) to ever get a full and proper whipping. Back into the womb of his mother, if he could resurrect her and find a way to climb in there.

And now they were trudging circles in the grass of nowhere special, just far enough from home to keep their kin from stumbling onto them. Walking off the way Bo had to say goodbye to the girl, waiting until he could scrape his emotions together well enough to face the old routine at the farm. Maybe, Luke wasn't sure. This was the kind of thing that always left him feeling clumsy and stupid with the recognition that he could outsmart the sheriff and county commissioner, but he didn't have the first idea how to handle a broken-hearted cousin.

He'd never been much good at tears. He just wanted them to stop, and when they were kids that had always meant depositing Bo in Aunt Lavinia's arms. Even that time when they'd been out in the old Potter's fields and his bumbling little kid of a cousin had stepped on a bee's nest, getting himself stung more times than either of their young brains could count, Luke's only thought had been about guiding the boy home. Hand on the back of his neck, just fingertips really, because he hadn't been entirely sure that there were no welts there. Endless walk and Bo hadn't stopped screaming the whole way as Luke had steered him around holes and tree roots that his eyes were too watery to see. Finally found their aunt on the back porch, where she had been beating the rugs, and she'd taken over from there. She told him he'd done a good job, but he didn't believe her. All he'd managed was to get the boy home; it was her that had soothed him.

"She—" _ain__'__t __worth __getting __this __upset __over_, was what he wanted to say, but he'd tried that one already.

"Just—" Bo's hand shoved at his hair where the long summer days in the fields had bleached it to nearly white. Pushed it back away from his eyes, and away went any pretense of being aloof, hardened, above feeling pain. There he was, just a little kid without a mother's arms to hold him, and Luke—Luke didn't have the first idea how to make up for all the things his cousin would never have. "Stop. I already know didn't like her none. You never did."

And that part was not entirely true. Back in those schoolyard days of their sepia-tinted youth, when little boys drew circles in the dust for marbles while little girls traced out squares for hopscotch, little Jilly Rae had been willing to march right across those lines. She never got too upset about dirty knees or broken nails, the ends of her hair had been chewed on and she had a sassy mouth, but she was okay. She could hit a line drive and she wasn't afraid to slide into a base head first, and Luke had picked her for his team more than once.

But he didn't suppose any of that held water against the way his cousin's head dipped low, sorrowing over a two-week fling with the girl. No amount of admitting that she wasn't so terrible would make Bo smile and shrug off his blues.

"Come on," Luke said.

"What?" the cranky man to his left complained, but he followed along anyway. Away from the pond, the listless insects, away from the trail where they were about to be stumbled on by old Nels Anderson and his bird-spying binoculars anyway, up to the patch of dirt off the side of the road. To the General, where he guided Bo to the driver's side, because that was where Luke had always known how to comfort him. To point out at the road and let Bo's foot press down against the accelerator as hard and as long as it needed to until girls were just blurs, already in the past before they could even be fallen for, before they could become broken hearts.


	2. Of Songs and Babies

**_Author's note:_**_ Sorry, I didn't mean to go so long between updates. __I just found myself second guessing certain decisions I'd made about this story and considering changes. I decided to trust my initial instincts and hope that was the right choice. _

_Like I said in the last chapter, the story follows canon for a while. You'll start to really see what I mean with this installment, I think. The silly chapter names will give you some idea of where we are in the series, since I am incorporating parts of the episode titles in them._

_Forgot all my disclaimers last time. About how just about every character you meet in this one is not owned by me, and in some ways, the plot of the early chapters isn't entirely mine either. I don't earn anything for the things I make those characters do, and I mean no harm to, well, anyone with what I write here._

_Thanks for reading!  
><em>

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 2 - Of Songs and Babies<strong>

Sunday dawned gray and soupy and Bo wasn't exactly quick about getting out of bed. Chores were one thing and he'd never been in a hurry for those, not if he thought he could get Luke to do them for him. Any other day of the week and Luke would have sworn that was the beginning and end of the reasoning for that pillow over his cousin's head.

But, "I don't want to go to church," came mumbling out from underneath.

And that was just silly, because it was an hour. Two, if the trip there and back counted, three if the bathroom wars between his two pretty cousins got factored in. Four, tops, if there was some sort of an event after, but those were usually painless. A picnic, a bake sale, a few moments spent serving something sweet to the town's kids, and all told it was just a fraction of the week when they had to be on their best behavior. Not much to ask, but it wasn't like Jesse asked it of them anyway; it was a lot closer to a demand. Barring communicable disease, there was no way out of it. Jesse swore it'd do them good to set foot in the Lord's house at least once a week.

And it did. After Luke had all but wrestled him out of bed, shoved him out to the barn for chores and listened to him grumble throughout, after he'd pointed him off to the shower and just about dressed him in his best jeans and button-down shirt, once they'd made it to town, all sandwiched into the pickup's front seat, and then settled in precisely the same tight configuration in their usual pew, once the preacher had said his piece and they'd all sung their hymns, there was the impromptu gathering on the church lawn. Where Bo was the center of a flutter of girls, and by the time Jesse was herding the family back to the pickup, he'd made dates with at least two of them without second thought to the fact that Jill Dodson had headed off to Macon just yesterday. Luke figured, right then and there, that maybe church _was_ good for them. Just not in the way Jesse (or the Lord) intended.

Monday started out just as slow for no reason other than the fact that it was Monday. Even if they weren't kids catching a school bus anymore and they didn't have to run down to the mill to punch a clock, the Duke boys still knew it was Monday. The goats knew it was Monday, too, and they must've told Maudine. The chickens pecked against the notion of starting another week and even Daisy was grumpy when Luke left the milk bucket on the counter for too long while he washed his hands.

Tuesday didn't hold much promise, at least not when dawn forgot to come. Early morning thunderstorms leaving the sky just as black as night, but the livestock didn't get any less hungry in the rain, so they'd been good boys and gone out to feed them. Came back into the house all water and mud, with barely any room for farm boy underneath. Got glowered at by their supposedly-sugar-and-spice cousin for tracking the outside into the inside, but Jesse had just tutted and told them to get cleaned up for breakfast. Bo had insisted on first shower (and shivered in his wet clothes, so what was Luke to do but let him have it?) and Luke had stood near the oven because even if his blood wasn't quite as thin as Bo's he was still wet and the house was still drafty. Daisy let him steal a sizzling sausage right out of her pan, so she must've gotten sympathetic after all. Jesse rolled his eyes when Luke gave up his vigil in the kitchen and went to bang on the bathroom door because Bo was using up all the hot water. Back in the old man's day there was no such thing as indoor plumbing and his nephews were fools for arguing over the use of it now. When they were no more than filthy little brats, their Aunt Lavinia used to shove them both at once into that old steel tub in the kitchen and tell them to stop fussing at each other and get clean; Jesse might just have wished for her to be there to do that to them now even if there was no way they'd both fit without arms and legs hanging over the edge.

But the day got better as the weather got worse. No point in farming or brewing when water was coming out of the sky fast enough to drown a man. No way to stay in the house when Daisy had designs on cleaning everything in it, including any cousin that was fool enough to be home while she was in that mood, so they had no choice but to take Jesse's pickup to the Boar's Nest and relax there. One beer each that they had to nurse through the hours filled with flirting and dancing with anything in a skirt, because as the rain let up the skies stayed dark. Sniffing the air like cats at dusk and the Duke boys knew – it would be a good running night. Said their goodbyes to the young ladies (and if that kiss Bo planted on sweet little Della was any indication, the boy's lips had forgotten all about one Jill Dodson) and headed home to trade in a white pickup for a black Ford.

Tilly loved them better than any human female ever could, guiding them over slick clay like it was dry blacktop, hiding them amongst the trees and shrubs, and laughing right along with them as they left poor Andy Roach to spin out in a puddle-filled rut.

Wednesday didn't seem like much at first. Lazy day under still-gray skies, slow and sloppy. Bows too taut, arrows out of balance, targets that somehow never moved and yet dodged the arrows the Duke boys slung at them all the same. The kind of quiet day they'd earned after a night of wild driving, and that must've been why Daisy turned on the radio long enough to hear her own song playing back at her.

There was, of course, no way to plug up their ears and pretend they hadn't heard it, nor was there any means for them to dull their wits and ignore the fact that if Daisy's song was on the radio, they all ought to be a lot more rich than they currently were. Since there were no diamonds on their fingers or minks in their closets, and since tonight's dinner wouldn't be a fine side of beef but more like a sow's belly, there was nothing to do but make a run into Atlanta. Some man had taken advantage of their pretty little cousin and it was up to the Duke boys to see that he never did that again. And if that meant that a boring morning of letting Bo beat him in an archery competition (all in the name of rebuilding the boy's bruised ego, of course) got interrupted in deference to a trip into the city, well he could muster a grimace about that. And then a smirk, because Bo was already elbowing him in the ribs about the fun they could get up to in Atlanta.

After, that was, they gave a city-slicker some basic lessons in decency and manners, and how you didn't go taking advantage of dreamers like Daisy. Shouldn't take more than a minute or two, even with Jesse's insistence that they play fair and not take advantage of those poor fools in Atlanta.

Except those poor fools had guns, and big ones. They also had Daisy's money, so there was nothing to do but persevere, to take those guns away and even the odds, to demand either royalties or a refund. Of course what they got instead was nearly busted in a suddenly-emerging raid, then tossed an open-reel tape that Luke instinctively held onto even as he skidded down an embankment and slid over the General's hood to dive face first into the window, got chased halfway back to Hazzard, and finally made it home to face down one Jesse Duke without having accomplished their mission. (But in the middle of it all, Bo had paused to stare long and hard at a marginally attractive female, so that just went to show that Wednesday wasn't going to be all bad. Jill, at least, was just about completely forgotten by now.)

Their uncle wasn't without mercy. He gave them lunch before sending them back to Atlanta to get it right this time. To bust up a piracy ring that their innocent cousin had set her foot into without meaning to, but then the girl always had been an overachiever.

So much of an overachiever, in fact, that Wednesday turned into Thursday before they got done making trips to Atlanta, and pretty soon this whole escapade would wind up costing so much in gas that they really were going to need those royalties that Daisy's song wasn't earning them. Then again, Thursday's journey to the city was probably worth it. He and Bo spent time around a pool filled with pretty little fillies dressed in nothing more than strategically placed strips of cloth while Daisy did some fine undercover work up in an apartment on the second floor. Luke watched the windows for any sign of trouble while Bo flirted his way from one end of the pool to the other, and it seemed like a perfectly normal day.

Friday dragged by as Bo played with fireworks while Luke tuned the old yellow car and Daisy pouted over lost chances at stardom.

Saturday made it all worthwhile. Oh, sure, they failed more than they succeeded. They just about got caught up in a raid on Miss Mabel and her mobile prostitution ring when they stopped by to ask for her assistance (and Luke's reputation took a few hits from last summer's fling of a girlfriend who claimed hooking was a step up from being with him), they drove around in a big and pointless circle from Hazzard to Atlanta and back, they lost track of Daisy then found her again and they never did get any money out of any of it. But they dynamited Rosco's cruiser and threw an impromptu party with Miss Mabel, some syndicate men, the Hazzard County Commissioner and a few Feds in attendance. And then, because they hadn't been destructive enough, they blew up a record-pressing plant. Orange streaks of fire in the sky, Bo's giggle in his ear as they admired their handiwork, and in all it had been a good day.

Sunday Bo got his wish from the week before. Jesse joined them in the barn for chores, and mumbled something about how church could wait until next Sunday for his boys – they needed to make one more trip to Atlanta. The preacher's sermon went on without them as they grinned their way through a morning with a beautiful woman (and though she was married, Bo showed no signs of recognizing that fact, so it was a good thing her manager was along to chaperone or they might have found themselves in trouble all over again), had themselves a little fun in the city, and still managed to make it home in the afternoon with good news. Daisy's song, a fine bit of music written by a sweet country gal (who had a nasty right hook and could shuck and jive a revenuer with the best of them), would be recorded by famed country singer Jessi Colter.

And Bo hadn't mentioned or mooned over Jill Dodson throughout the whole mess. All in all, it was a good week.

* * *

><p>Luke was (and he was fairly certain that he could get the backing of his friends and family on this one) a jerk. And a fool, too, but since most of the town thought he was a genius, Bo didn't reckon on getting much support about that part.<p>

_When__'__s __the __baby __due_, he'd asked in all his smug righteousness. _Babies __are __messy._

Hardly more than two weeks ago Luke had been brimming with all manner of cleverness about why Bo couldn't go to Macon with Jill. (Not, he'd come to realize, that his cousin was wrong. Hazzard's mark on him went deeper than his flesh or even his bones – it was the air in his lungs and the water he drank, it was life to him. He belonged here like the sun belonged in the sky. But that wasn't the point, oh not at all the point.) Because with Jill there'd be babies and kids and snotty noses and dirty diapers, and Luke just wanted to save him from all of that.

_When__'__s __the __baby __due_ – just smirking with superiority because that big old brilliant brain of his had thought it was so clever in pointing out had badly Duke boys and babies mixed.

And then that same too-smart cousin had gone off and picked up Mary Kaye Porter from the side of the road. Honey blonde hair, baby blue eyes, five-foot-five, loads of dimples and a big old bun in the oven. A baby all but bursting out of her, and sure, Bo could see how they had to look out for her. Sure he could, what with how she walked all tipped backwards, her face pinched and flushed all at once as she heaved that rounded belly from here to there. Helpless, really, weighted down by a child that hadn't even see fit to get born yet, and what else could they do? They had to stop for her.

They had to keep her safe, too. She was a wanted girl (she was a thief, but for whatever reason, Luke was all for overlooking that little fact), the sort of wanted that would bring a sneaky, crude mobster like Quirt McQuade to little old Hazzard in search of her. So Bo could agree to most of what was happening. (Except the parts where Luke's bony elbow kept nudging at the muscle of his upper arm – don't drive so fast, Bo, can't you hear the way the pregnant girl's moaning? She's _with__ child._So what if she bit you for no good reason, Bo, she's got a baby in her belly and her life's hard enough.) The money they tried to give her, though they had less than usual thanks to all those trips to Atlanta last week, the way they allowed gangster's guns to be aimed in their faces just so they wouldn't be pointed at her, hiding in recessed corners of the county instead of running full speed but in plain sight, Bo worked his way around to understanding all of that.

But the pickled peaches, that horrid excuse for fruit, the juice running over Luke's fingers as he held the jar for her, the napkins in his pocket like he'd been domesticated and actually liked helping the girl deal with her pregnancy cravings, that was too much. After that there was their confinement in the kitchen, watching water boil while they tore up sheets, as if Luke had ever tolerated sitting still and doing anything that useless in his whole life. And then the final straw. "For that lady in there—" Lady, his foot. Left foot, because the right one was kicking out where Luke's shin should have been, except his cousin was too busy standing up to receive the pain that Bo so deeply wanted to dole out. "I wouldn't halfway mind."

Luke Duke. Wouldn't mind marrying a girl that was just about to give birth to another man's baby? Luke Duke, the same cousin that had spent a whole night of running whiskey down one mountain and up another, across detours and rutted trails, skirting lakes and skidding on loose dirt, all while jabbering nonstop about how foolish Bo would be to follow after a girl that wanted kids someday in some far distant future? _That_ Luke Duke wouldn't halfway mind wiping both ends of a messy child that wasn't even his?

Mary Kaye was a girl in over her head, and they had to save her life. Luke was just too big an idiot to see that it was too late to save her reputation, too.

All right, so after they made a fiery show of protecting her, when McQuade and his henchman had been wedged into the back of the sheriff's cruiser while their rights were read to them in that squeaky, overexcited voice of Deputy Strate, Mary Kaye had taken her baby and gone back to Atlanta. She rebuffed all of Luke's attempts to make her a halfway honest woman, and to his cousin's credit, he never even thought of following after her. Out of sight, out of mind, and there were no broken hearts involved.

But there was no denying it – for just about wrenching Bo away from Jill and her baby-making threat and then making goo-goo eyes at Mary Kaye a scant two weeks later, Luke was a jerk. And for considering raising a child himself, Luke was an idiot.

But, despite what anyone might ever say to the contrary, what happened with Roxanne a little further on down the road was in no way an attempt to exact revenge on his smug cousin.


	3. High Octane Squabbling in the Swamp

**_Author's note: _**_Hope y'all had a great Thanksgiving (for those who celebrate it). Welcome to the holiday season!_

_Oh, you may notice, starting here, that some episodes barely get mentioned and others get skipped entirely. Sometimes they just didn't have anything to contribute to the story arc.  
><em>

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter Three - High Octane Squabbling in the Swamp<strong>

Daisy was dead set on blaming him.

"Give that one back."

"Huh?" His mind could be forgiven for wandering. She'd been lighting into him for a full three minutes by that point in the same theme and tenor as she'd been spouting at him for the last two days. Tuning her out was just survival; he had it on good authority that a man could die from boredom.

"Give it back!" came that snapping tone, then skinny fingers snatching a wet plate out of his hands, and it was sheer luck that kept it from slipping away from them both and shattering on the floor.

"All right," he answered back, watching as she rescrubbed what she'd already washed. The kind of stain that only female eyes could see, apparently, because Luke had been perfectly willing to dry that plate and stack it high in the cupboard.

Two days of being sniped at and all through dinner Jesse had given him that look. _Fix __it. __Now. _As if Luke could, when the girl was being utterly irrational.

"You just about got him killed." Like that. Crazy talk, and how was he supposed to fix anything as long as her logic was all warped and female? He'd known it would be a perfect waste of time but he'd stayed back to help her with the dishes when Bo and Jesse headed out to evening chores anyway, if only to have the excuse that he'd given it his best effort when the old timer got around to cornering him later.

"I did not." And he was a fool for bothering to answer back, because what had been a monologue that he was perfectly content to tune out until it was nothing more than static was about to become a genuine argument. If, that was, she didn't grab hold of the old iron skillet that was soaking on the stove, and take after him with it.

But he hadn't, in fact, done anything of the sort. Yeah, Bo had gone into the lake at Black Hollow in a truck weighted down with weaponry, sinking to the bottom faster than a stone. But that hadn't been Luke's doing, and he'd been the first one to reach out and give his cousin a hand out of the water once he re-emerged in a ring of waves. (That he hadn't followed his cousin in, that he'd frozen there on the shore about as immobile as the trees that surrounded him, just waiting to see whether Bo would surface – yeah, he had some guilt about that. Very personal, private guilt and it'd never happen that way again, because he'd also made himself a very personal, private vow about that.)

So much for washing dishes. Daisy's hands had vastly more important places to be, planted there on her hips and those eyes just glaring at him for his idiocy.

"You boys was too busy bickering to pay attention to what was right there in front of you." See now, she had that all wrong. Rosco's cruiser had hit the panel truck from behind, shoving it driver, cargo and naked-baby camouflage right into the lake. So if anyone deserved the lecture it was the sheriff. "Acting like fools, and it wouldn't have happened if you hadn't gotten between him and Jill and him and Roxanne."

If she wasn't going to wash that plate she'd left in the sink, he could least be drying it. "I ain't had nothing to do with him breaking up with Jill," and that was the truth. The boy had withstood every one of his objections; it was Jesse who had gotten between them, and it was Jesse whose hand should be getting slapped for reaching into the sink right now. (And if anyone could get away with trying something that insane, it would be Daisy.) As to Roxanne—

Well, Daisy had liked her well enough. Had stood right here in the kitchen next to her as she'd scrubbed in that old tin tub telling her they'd help her become a better revenue agent, and she'd probably meant it, too. So maybe she had a legitimate gripe about how her best and maybe only female friend in town had been taken away from her. But that hadn't been Luke's doing, any more than any part of his other fool cousin's relationship with her had been Luke's doing.

_Roxanne Huntley. With a name like that he might have expected a buxom blonde, skimpily clad, but she was just as plain as any school teacher he'd ever had, with that same knot of hair on the back of her head, and that same penchant for scolding. Of course, that part might have come with the territory – she was, after all, the new revenuer in town. Seemed he and Bo had dumped old Andy Roach in the drink one too many times, and the poor guy had opted for a desk job in Atlanta. And somehow or other, the Feds had figured that sending a defenseless girl after the Dukes (and sure, the rest of the region's moonshiners, but the Duke boys had never been caught on a run, which made them a prize that every revenuer wanted) was the right way to go._

_Maybe it had been; Bo never had been smart when it came to women. Oh, the boy had instincts, but they got lost somewhere around the time feminine wiles got employed._

_It took a little time with Roxanne. Everything started out just fine when Bo first caught sight of her through the glass door to Andy Roach's office on the second floor of the courthouse and snickered about how old Andy got himself a secretary to keep him company. Sheriff Coltrane, passing from here to there, stopped to tut and sputter a whole bunch before coming out with a few intelligible words about how she wasn't a Gal Friday, she was more of a thorn in his side. _

"_She's a woman," Rosco had announced with a convulsive shake of his head. "A female woman."_

"_Well yeah," Bo had answered back. "I noticed that," and of course he had. There wasn't a single female that Bo hadn't noticed since somewhere around the age of thirteen. _

"_A woman!" Rosco said again, because surely it bore repeating. "And she figures she's going to catch you."_

"_Whoa, whoa, whoa," Luke had interrupted. Because Bo was already excited by the notion of a female wanting to catch them, but they were in the courthouse, not courting on a grassy bank of a pond. Besides, it was cold enough to see their breath outside, and didn't none of them need to be undressing each other – mentally or otherwise. "She's going to catch us?" Nonsense syllables in reply from the Sheriff, so, "Introduce us," Luke had commanded, pushing her door open._

"_R. Huntley." Bo always had been the quick one, reading the engraved sign on her desk instead of waiting for proper introductions. Not that the Sheriff was exactly in a hurry to be sociable. _

"_That__'__s _Miss_ Huntley,__" __she __had __asserted,__ making __Bo__ catch__ his __eye._ I believe that_,__ his__ smirk__ said._

_She wasn't, Bo would have agreed in those earliest moments, anything much to look at. Shirt buttoned right up to her neck, hair in a prim and proper bun and a hard, harassed look on her face, especially as she took a long and steady look at Rosco. Seemed like she was about as impressed with the sheriff as he was with her. And unless Luke reminded them both that they weren't alone, he reckoned a sniping little battle might start up right there on the spot, so he cleared his throat._

"_Miss Huntley," old Rosco started._

"_That's Agent Huntley," she had corrected, and Luke found himself turning toward Bo, and seeing a mirror image of his own raised eyebrows. "What can I do for you, Sheriff?" All business, firm lines and angles, mouth pulled in tight like she was keeping herself from giving the duly constituted law of Hazzard a proper what-for. (And if she really was a revenue agent, as she seemed to be hinting, there wasn't a danged thing Rosco could do about it if she did decide to tell him a thing or two.)_

"_Ijit!" And that was what a person got for riling the Hazzard law – nonsense shouted at high volume. "These," came through gritted teeth, and it wasn't clear whether Rosco hated the woman in front of him or the two men behind him more. "Are the Duke boys."_

_She didn't stand and offer a hand to shake, like any well-raised Hazzardite would do; instead she tipped her schoolmarmish head back toward the desk and flipped open a folder that was conveniently lying there._

"_Lukas K.," she read, and apparently she'd been studying up on them. "And Beauregard," she finished, finally looking up like she was trying to figure out which was which. She'd gotten her book learning done, but she hadn't gone out on the streets yet, hadn't talked to a single soul in Hazzard or she would have known—_

"_That's just Bo, Ma'am."_

—_Never to call Bo Duke that. And certainly—_

"_Lukas K.," she read out like she was scolding. Hard to say whether it was Bo, the sheriff, or even Andy Roach's notes that were at the receiving end of her ire. "And—"_

"_Bo," his cousin had asserted._

"_Regard," she'd continued, without missing a beat. "Are suspected of both distilling and transporting illegal intoxicants."_

__—_Not twice.  
><em>

"_Aw, shoot, not us, Ma'am," Bo had said with that hard edged smile that indicated how little he liked her. "We're just country boys. We don't even know what illegal intoxicants are."_

"_Now if you was to ask us about moonshine," Luke added as a tease. Enough to get her all excited about the confession he had no plans to make. Instead his fingers took hold of Bo's belt, all the better to guide him toward the door. "We know all about that. Why, it's the opposite of sunshine." Two more steps, and, "Have a nice day," he added before shoving his cousin out into the hallway._

"_Well," he'd commented, as soon as he figured they had enough privacy. "Looks like old Andy got tired of chasing us and done passed the torch." It had happened before; revenuers had gotten worn out and used up by chasing the Dukes through the centuries. "This ought to be fun."_

_And it really should have been, too. Because it only took a couple of days before the unfortunate woman started stumbling around in the woods, looking for their still site. Oh sure, there must've been some amount of foresight. She'd grabbed a fishing pole, had talked some poor fool out of boots and a vest in an effort to disguise herself. But she would've been wiser to stay behind her desk, what with how she knew nothing about moonshiners' tricks and traps, got caught up in the first trip wire she must've come across. Clink and clank of bottles and the Dukes had converged on her from all sides. Masquerading as a blonde, and that might have done it right there. She'd been fool enough follow her nose right up to the still, and then to sniff at the fermented mash inside which should have been a deterrent, but even before she passed out from the powerful fumes, Bo's hormones had gone into high gear._

_Didn't seem to matter that when she fell to the ground she revealed herself to be that same pinch-faced brunette that had called him Beauregard just two days earlier. By that time Bo was suggesting mouth to mouth resuscitation to revive her while Jesse went into the well-practiced routine of getting rid of the evidence, same as he'd done a dozen times before when there'd been risk of getting caught. When the life-saving maneuver was done and their lips parted, it didn't deter his cousin one bit that Miss Huntley announced that he was under arrest. And once she realized she had no case, and Jesse invited her to supper (which was only polite, what with her being new to town and all) Bo was right there with suggestions about where she could spend the night._

_Their usually wise uncle aided and abetted what was sure to become disaster when he agreed to the notion (though he insisted on dormitory-style sleeping, girls bunking with girls and boys with boys) and sent the revenuer down to his truck to wait for them._

"_If you can keep her busy tonight, I'll sneak on up here and make another batch." They had, after all, customers to satisfy. It was a fine plan, except for the raging ball of hormones that was his blonde cousin. Who stood outside the kitchen while she bathed in that old tin tub, then tried to get her to dress in something slinky (but she'd been fortunately too practical to comply, and that was a mercy for them all) before taking her out to the Boar's Nest. Oh sure, it was all part of Luke's plan to get her too intoxicated to go sneaking around any still sites or chasing after deliveries for the next day or so, but Bo never could stick to a script. Always improvising and ad-libbing until what had been a perfectly tidy plot became nothing more than a jumble of missteps that, somehow or other usually worked themselves out, but not without Luke having to do twice as much work as he would otherwise._

"There wasn't no part of Roxanne that was my fault," he pointed out to Daisy, "and if you wash that plate any harder, you're going to scrub the pattern right off." Not that would matter if she did. The Dukes didn't have two matching plates in the bunch.

"Fine," got snapped back at him, plate slapped into his hand with enough force behind it to sting a little. A coating of frost glazed the windows in front of them from the chill of winter outside where Bo and Jesse would be quick about their work. Soon enough the kitchen would get crowded again and if he hadn't made his peace with Daisy by then, the old man might just make him dig out his sleeping bag and spend the night out there with the icicles.

"Daisy," he tried to reason.

"I said fine, Luke Duke." All right, there was no arguing with that. Nothing to do but dry the dish in his hands and wait for his doom. "You know," and here it came. "There wasn't a one of us that thought him getting with Roxanne was a good idea. We just wasn't so nasty about it."

Nasty. "I wasn't nasty about nothing," he defended, because he hadn't been. He'd been direct, maybe, somewhat frank. Honest and straightforward, because Bo Duke wouldn't recognize a hint for what it was, even if it was bigger than Texas and blunter than a baseball bat. Daisy should have known that; after all, she'd thrown him quite a few on the subject of the revenuer herself. About how Roxanne had a job to do, about how Jesse might have said he should keep her busy and Luke might have made the plan for the Duke boy and the revenue agent to dance through the night, but that didn't mean he should ask her to go out the next night, or the one after that. "I just told it to him right, is all."

_No beating around the bush, he'd just told Bo straight out that he was an idiot. He'd pointed out that it was dumb enough that the Feds thought sending a woman revenuer out into the field was a good idea, and asked whether Bo really needed to compound that kind of stupidity. And then he'd made the obvious connection that Bo wasn't willing to make himself. "She's just using you anyways," he'd announced._

_Bo hadn't taken that part altogether well. His chin had jutted, his eyes had squinted, and he'd told Luke to look after his own love life, then laughed and reminded them both that the last girl Luke had wanted anything to do with had been nine months along with another man's child. And the one before that had announced that hitching a ride with Miss Mabel's rolling whorehouse had been an improvement over being with Luke._

_And then, once again, Jesse had intervened. Had told Bo he could date whoever he liked, and just about the time that pink tongue was ready to stick itself out at Luke in victory, the old man had added on the part about how it was just a shame that Bo would have to move into the barn. Because if he was going to go dating a revenuer, he couldn't be in the house where they talked about the business. But Maudine, well she'd welcome him with open hooves, especially since he'd be right there each morning to feed her, first thing. And the goats, well, they'd always been partial to Bo (which was true – if you could call their penchant for getting under his feet 'love'), not to mention the chickens—_

_It probably wasn't a real threat. It didn't matter; the threat of a threat was always enough for Bo. His whole life, and Jesse hardly had to do more than look in the general direction of the bedroom where he kept his strap to get a young Bo backtracking and confessing. _

"_I reckon I don't need to keep seeing Roxanne," had been his cousin giving in to the inevitable. "There's lots of other girls in Hazzard."_

"Told it to him right, my foot." And Luke had better watch those feet of his cousin's. The girl had the kind of disposition that could go from sweet to vengeful in a heartbeat. She wore pointed heels, and she wasn't opposed to stamping them right into the toe of an offending man's boot. Leather was meager protection against the wrath of Daisy. "You wasn't even halfway nice about it. And you ain't stopped. You been looking for ways to call him stupid ever since."

"I ain't called him stupid once." Oh sure, he'd lost his temper after Bo left a live stick of dynamite in with the duds and blew up the outhouse during target practice. He might have made some odd comparison or other as regarded Bo's brain and turnips (small ones) but he hadn't called him stupid. He didn't think, but he couldn't swear, because there had been those car magazines blown all to bits and floating in the air like so many snowflakes and he—he couldn't be completely sure what his mouth might have been saying while his brain was busy stewing over how much money he'd spent on those ashy bits of paper falling from the sky.

"Fine, Luke," got punctuated by the next plate, wet and slippery as the last, being thrust at him like it was nothing more than a Frisbee. Caught it as much with his gut as his hands, and he might just as well pull off his shirt and use it for a towel, what with how much water it was picking up. "You been a perfect gentleman."

A gentle man, no, he hadn't been anything like gentle. But Bo wasn't a girl and he wasn't a kid anymore, either. He knew when he'd done wrong, and he only halfway fought back when Luke kept after him about the outhouse, because he'd been fully aware he had it coming to him.

And Swamp Molly, complete with Cousin Alice, had seemed to be the cosmos agreeing with Luke that Bo needed to be punished. Because nothing good had ever come from the way old Molly had their uncle tied up in a knot around her bony little fingers, and Alice had had her sights on Bo ever since she got big enough to sit on him and squash him into the dirt of the farmyard.

"_Them boys," Jesse had started in, holding up his only defense against Molly's wiles – his kids. "Is some of the most-wanted moonshine drivers in this whole state. Why, them Feds just sent a brand new agent up here expressly to catch them two."_

_And that, right there, might have been the slightest exaggeration. Sure, Harvey Essex had arrived last week to replace Roxanne Huntley. And, yes, the Feds hadn't been any too happy to be sending yet another fresh face to take over the region when they'd only just done that very same thing a few weeks earlier. Rumor might have gotten around that it was those dastardly Duke boys that had driven Miss Huntley to distraction and made her ask to be transferred somewhere – anywhere, and the further away, the better – else. And that little bit of gossip might have made the new revenuer do some digging into the files on the Dukes, and some fishing into the rumor mill for tales of the family that'd never been caught. And yeah, scrawny Harvey might have had his heart set on being the one to break their streak, but he was no different from any other revenuer in that regard. _

"_Aw, Jess," Molly had scolded. "You know I can't make my nephew do my run for me." Because that was what the old snake charmer from the swamp had come in search of. A couple of fine young men – whose souls had been long since condemned to hell – to make a moonshine delivery for her. "What with him being in divinity school and all. And if I don't get this batch delivered, well, I can't pay for him to finish up and get his degree. You know I'm all he has in this world." But Jesse wasn't a belly-crawling forked-tongued reptile, and he wouldn't fall for her heart-string tugging. "I suppose I could send Alice," whose eyes got round as silver dollars, though she nodded bravely. "If you ain't of a mind to help me."_

_And right then, Luke knew it was all over. Jesse would let himself be wooed and charmed into doing whatever manner of dancing Molly wanted him to. Not that Luke was opposed – Molly's run would take them right across the heart of Hazzard, cutting through some pretty exciting territory. The sort of place where even Rosco might take out after a moonshine runner, and they'd never made such a bold run. He was all for it._

_Yeah, okay, so once handshakes had sealed the deal and the Duke boys had been consigned out for their driving skills, Luke might gotten a little carried away. He'd made a point of showing Bo how much he trusted Cooter to disguise the truck that they were going to use to haul Molly's wares, while continuing to ride his cousin about past mistakes made. He'd forgotten to be grateful when his fine plan fell to pieces and he – truck full of illegal product and all – got caught at a roadblock and then saved by Bo. He'd kept sniping at his cousin even after Rosco actually managed to get them stopped and they learned that what they were hauling wasn't liquid but solid, not firewater but firearms. He knew he was pushing too hard when Bo snapped back at him as they bamboozled Rosco long enough to get back out on the run, but he didn't quit._

_And somehow or other, after they'd run around in enough circles, crabbing at each other every bit as much as Molly and the situation she had gotten them into, when they'd gotten the truck back out of hiding, Bo had wound up in the driver's seat as everything went to hell. Weighted down by tons of steel, his cousin had been propelled at high speed into the middle of the lake at the heart of Black Hollow. The one with quicksand at the bottom, the one into which things disappeared, never to emerge again._

_And__ Luke __had __seen __Bo __go __under, __but __got __frozen __there __at __the __edge __of __the __water __instead__ of __going __in__ after __him. __Fortunately __Bo __had __reappeared __all __on __his __own, __much __to __the __glee __of __everyone __(most __particularly__ Cousin __Alice, __who__ had __promised __to __warm__ him __up __after __that __cold __water, __and__ Luke __hadn__'__t __exactly __protected __Bo __from__ that, __either)._

So all right. Daisy's female brain was prone to exaggeration, but it wasn't her fault that she was a girl. And that she was actually a little bit right.

Luke sighed as he held up a hand. Stop, don't throw any more plates at me, I surrender. Daisy wasn't as good at reading his gestures as Bo was, but she seemed to get the message. Stood there looking at him, all but tapping her foot.

"All right. I'll apologize to him later."

Which he must've forgotten to actually do, but the intention was there.


	4. A Hazzardous Love Story

**Chapter Four - A Hazzardous Love Story**

"Now, you're risking something with Luke that's a lot more valuable than an automobile." Advice from a wise old man, and he couldn't say he hadn't asked for it or didn't deserve it. It was just that he hardly wanted to be talking about Luke at all. Or worrying about what he was risking when everything that happened was Luke's fault anyway.

Dang know-it-all cousin, always smarter than he needed to be, smarter than anyone ever asked him to be, too smart, half the time, to be tolerated. A love affair with his brain and his own cleverness, and at least Luke was safe that way. Predictable. He'd figure out how this piece of something fit with that, and then this other over there and before long he'd assemble some sort of a plan. Orders came next, the smug idiot telling men twice his age what to do and how to do it, and they'd all listen to him, even those who wore badges and were supposed to be on opposite sides of the imaginary line that ran between what was right and what was legal. Things would go wrong and his cousin would tinker with his plan like it was no more than a misfiring engine in a car, just pulling on this wire or that one until everything worked out and good old Luke Duke got credit for saving the day again.

Sure, Luke could solve problems. What the whole town seemed to have willfully forgotten was that he could cause them, too.

A girl driver. Now anyone would think that with his smarts, Luke would recognize the ridiculousness of such a notion. Even Daisy, who could hold her own and then some, wouldn't think of driving in the Hazzard Derby.

"She won't last the first lap," Luke had said, and those were the last intelligent words he'd uttered about Amy Creavy. Starting exactly twenty-six seconds later (he didn't have a watch and he hadn't been counting, but he knew speed and he knew races, and Luke was moving at a reckless pace) she'd begun to wedge her way into their lives like a splinter, cutting through the surface and working her way deeper with every move. Smile, sass, tough talk but she demurred like a schoolgirl and let Luke take a beating from her former boyfriend in the name of defending her honor. And then she'd curled her way into his cousin's arms like she'd always belonged there.

Not that he had any real problems with Amy, other than her foolish notions about driving against men. But she was a package deal – she came with Frankie.

If she cleaned up, if she put on a dress and maybe combed her hair, if she stopped talking tough (and through her nose, a sound that just about set Bo's teeth to grinding all by themselves) Frances Lee Olmsted might be an all right girl. But this Frankie, she had no interest in femininity or pursuing reasonable woman's activities. She had herself a wrench and she liked to pretend she had the first idea how to use it. And that was about the nicest thought Bo had about her.

Which was why it was all Luke's fault. Sure, it wasn't his male cousin that had invited the girls to stay at the Duke farm, and it wasn't Luke's idea to let Frankie sleep in Bo's bed while the Duke boys dug out their sleeping bags and headed for the loft in the barn to sleep with the animals. But Luke cuddling up with Amy in quiet corners left Bo to handle Frankie, and such a thing could drive any sane man mad.

And maybe he could plead insanity. (Maybe he could just keep banking on Luke to win the race. Maybe there was no reason for him to doubt his cousin's driving abilities, even though the boy's brains had clearly gone south.) If ever the time came that he had to tell Luke that he'd bet the General Lee against Amy's car Lucifer, winner take all, on the outcome of the race, he could simply point out that any man would have been driven to such a fate after fifteen minutes with Frankie. In the meantime, Luke was so tangled up in chasing after the dang redhead (okay, so he had nothing against Amy, but maybe he didn't precisely like her either, maybe he halfway resented the way she'd infiltrated every bit of their lives in less than twenty-four hours) that he might never learn about the bet anyway.

Except he would, of course he would. The town was tiny, the house even smaller, and secrets between Dukes never did survive for very long.

"What am I gonna do?" he asked the man who had raised him. About the bet, about the car, about the girl that was driving him nuts and the cousin that was— well, he didn't want to think about Luke anymore. His words came out, even he would have to admit, as a whine. A child's noise, the likes of which he hadn't made since before he was old enough to drive, which in his case was thirteen.

"Swallow some of that pride." Yeah, somewhere near the beginning of this conversation on the old homestead's porch, Jesse had pulled out his favorite adage about pride being a fine servant but a terrible master. But it wasn't that, it wasn't his pride that ached like a lump in his throat. It was something else, something nastier and filled with bile. "And get out of the bet."

He arranged his face in what he figured was pretty close to a smile and turned to catch his uncle's eyes for the first time during this little conversation. It was a necessary thing, just meant to show Jesse that he was ready to face up to his problems and be a man, only supposed to be enough to put an end to this conversation that he'd hated from the very first word, even if it had been him that started it. But the old man stilled from where he'd been replacing the screen that blew out every winter. Someday, and in the not too distant future, it would be warm enough to sit out here again, and Jesse never could stand for his afternoon naps out on the old porch swing to be interrupted by the buzz of a fly or the whine of a mosquito.

"Now Bo, I know that you and Luke have been fussing at each other for a while now."

Well, pretty much all their lives, really. They got out of sorts and then back into them about a half a dozen times a day. But that didn't explain why he'd put their prize possession up in a bet or why his face just couldn't quite bring itself to curve into a genuine smile.

"We're fine, Uncle Jesse." Or they would be, as long as Luke won the race and Frankie and Amy got out of their beds (and preferably all the way out of Hazzard, but these sorts of things had to be taken one step at a time).

"Since before Thanksgiving," Jesse went on, as if Bo hadn't just spoken. "And I reckon I know why. I know he made you feel like you was a fool for wanting to go down to Macon after Jill." Bo had nothing much to say about that, so he just offered up a one-sided shrug and pressed his lips together. "I know she was something special to you boy."

"I ain't sorry I didn't leave with her, Uncle Jesse." At least not most days. Hazzard was his blood, the air in his lungs, the water that quenched his thirst. It was nearly impossible to think of living anywhere else, even if he _had_ allowed himself to imagine it for a couple of days.

Then again, right about now he wouldn't mind putting a few miles between himself and the powder keg that was going to blow when Luke found out what he'd done.

"But you loved her," were sympathetic words, the kind he didn't quite know how to handle, considering he'd been a fool about the whole thing. "And Roxanne, I imagine Luke lit into you pretty good about her, too." And if Jill was an elephant-sized awkward conversation, Roxanne was a mastodon.

"I reckon he did. And I know I was a fool to care about either one of them Jesse. I didn't plan to, I just—" Jesse's hand, the one that wasn't still cradling the hammer, came up to stop him. And it was a good thing, too, because he had no idea how he planned to finish that sentence anyway.

"You followed your heart. Bo," the old man reached down for another tack, sorted through the pile there looking for a straight one. Then his eyes came up to stare into Bo's for just a second. "There ain't nothing wrong with that. Our hearts make for fine guides; they tell us where to go to find happiness and peace. I followed my heart out after your Aunt Lavinia, and you see how good a thing that was. And then I followed my heart when it told me that you three kids needed a good, safe home to grow up in, and that Lavinia and I could give you that kind of a home." A wink, then his uncle went back to banging his hammer on the window's edge. "You and me is alike that way. We follow our hearts. That is, when we ain't following out pride."

Yeah, all right. He should have known his pride was going to take a few more hits before this lecture got done.

"Now old Luke in there," courting Amy in the living room with sweet talk about spark plugs and crank shafts, and it was a good thing that Daisy was distracting Frankie in the kitchen or Bo would never have managed these few minutes alone with his uncle to confess his sins and take his lumps. "He don't halfway even know that he has a heart. He goes following his brain and sometimes that makes him seem smarter or more right, but that ain't necessarily so. There's a time and a pace for logic, and love ain't one of them." A firm bang of the hammer to make his point.

Wide fingers scratched around for another brad from the pile, and a handful fell to the floor. "Dabnabbit," Jesse complained, and that was as good as a cuss word from anyone else.

"I got them, Uncle Jesse," Bo offered. Sure the floor was about six inches closer when you were Jesse's height, but Bo still had an advantage in flexibility, even if the old man would tan his hide if he ever dared say such a thing out loud.

Down on one knee, handing hardware up one piece at a time, and he really did feel like a stupid little kid again.

"Luke don't halfway understand love," Jesse went on, patiently waiting for Bo to find each and every pointed little tack on the floorboards. "You can't take it apart and see what's inside, you can't tell it to go one way or another, you can't give it orders and expect it to obey, and Luke don't have much experience with that sort of thing. He don't much care for falling, so he keeps thinking his way from one end to the other." Bo was on all fours now, searching out any wanton sharp hardware that could embed themselves in a lazy boy's heel if he came out here barefoot in the morning. (And those leisurely mornings of summer could be the best, just sitting on the rough wood of the steps, watching the sun shine through the fog and spinning quiet yarns about what they day could hold. Some of his and Luke's greatest adventures had been dreamed up out here, without shoes or socks or even shirts – sometimes it seemed like all he needed to be happy was a summer day and Luke.) "And in all that time that Luke can't get his head out of where his heart belongs, he's falling in love just as fast as you ever done. Bo, get up here."

"Yes, sir." A hand got offered down to him and he knew what was coming next before it could even start happening. The second his feet were under him, his chin got caught in wide fingers and held there. _Look __at __me, __boy._

"I reckon it might seem unfair that Luke made you feel a fool for falling for them girls, and then there he goes running off with a girl of his own." Well, yeah, now that Jesse put it that way, it sure did seem unfair. "But he can't help it. If he could control it, he wouldn't be feeling half the things he is for that girl. He didn't do this to hurt you, boy." Bo sighed, nodded. _Yes,__ sir_, and Jesse let him go. "Now get out of that bet," came the command.

* * *

><p>He had a cup. Solid, shiny, cold metal. He had a cup and it was half Bo's because everything he'd ever owned was half Bo's. (And because they had themselves a little democracy going on between them. They found relatively peaceful ways of deciding who got to drive each race, and they shared every prize.) He had a cup, and Bo loved the cup. It made him smile and whoop and even buy a round of beer. The cup was enough to clear Bo's world of storms and bring him eternal sunshine.<p>

He had a cup and half the time he hated it. For being hard and cold, for taking the place of the girl he'd lost (and lost to, but she'd never tolerate the notion that he might have let her win), for having no give, for accepting his kisses without kissing him back with all the fervor of a woman who knew what she wanted.

He had a cup and it sat on the mantelpiece and mocked him. Not with a little girl's giggle, but a throaty laugh. The kind that reminded him, as if he could ever forget, that he was a loser and a fool. The kind who would let a girl win – his heart, the race, every argument they'd ever had.

"Luke," Jesse said. He had a cup in his hand, not the same as the one on the mantelpiece, but one that offered up its own brand of defeat. It was, after all, past midnight, and only a fool – or a man who had given up on sleep – would be drinking coffee at that time. "When you get as old as me, you can have insomnia. A boy your age needs sleep."

As if it were a choice, like he really wanted to be sitting here in the lumpy easy chair, left foot all pins and needles in a mockery of the way no other part of him could fall asleep, and staring at that damned cup. The one that saved Duke pride, but gave up everything else. He had nothing to say, no clever answers for his uncle. He just shrugged.

"Any more coffee in the pot?" the oldster queried, seemed to be some sort of acknowledgement that no amount of chastising was going to make Luke go back into his bedroom.

He and Bo had gotten that back now that Amy and Frankie were gone, and the little blonde brat was in there sleeping just as peacefully as a kitten with a belly full of milk. Because there was a cup on the mantelpiece and a car in the farmyard and—

"Not much," he answered, pulling himself up and out of the chair that never had fit his hind end very well. "I'll make you some."

—because he didn't want to think about Bo anymore. Didn't want to remember that smile over winning the cup, how it had wavered then fallen into this whole other look (shock, maybe?) when Luke had lit into him about betting the General against Amy's Lucifer.

"Sit." That was an order from one Jesse Duke, the grumpy old bear pulled out of his winter's nap to deal with a sleepless whippersnapper. Disobeying could lead to mauling the likes of which Luke's already tender backside wasn't up to handling. He sat.

Maybe hurt, maybe scared, maybe the look on Bo's face had been satisfying to him in the moment. When he'd just kissed the girl who had turned him upside down and inside out goodbye, he might have wanted someone else to feel their guts churning and their head spinning. And maybe Bo had made himself into a convenient target, clapping him on the shoulder and gloating over a cup not a full two minutes after he'd confessed to having risked the only thing the two of them owned that meant anything at all on a stupid bet to an annoying girl. (And maybe, if Luke had just asked Bo outright to carry the weight of his misery for him, to take from him his sorrows and bear them as if they were his own, his cousin would have willingly done so.)

"You didn't want her. Not really." So it turned out his uncle had stirred from his cozy den just to come out here and tell Luke what he had and hadn't wanted. "Or you would have treated her better."

"I treated her just fine, Uncle Jesse." The sort of words that should have been delivered in utter defiance, righteous tone and chin in the air. Instead he mumbled them directly toward the table while his head bowed so he could run his hand through his hair without lifting his elbows off its surface. "I saved her from Turk, didn't I?"

Some tinkering over there on the stove, then the room brightened a little as a fire got lit under the coffee pot.

"You didn't propose to her." Silence, and Jesse finally turned away from his careful study of the pot to look at him. "You going to tell me you just plumb forgot to ask her to marry you, like you used to tell me you forgot to do your homework when you was just a tyke sitting in that very same chair?"

More silence, because there was no way Luke was even going to pretend to answer that one.

"You didn't want her."

"She was—she had a temper and she wouldn't listen to reason," he defended, even if he didn't really want to, didn't mean to say anything at all, but Jesse was goading him. Knew just where his belt was and where to swing to hit below it.

"Neither do you, Luke. Seems like she was willing to put up with you." No she hadn't been. She'd stormed out at the very first words she hadn't wanted to hear, she'd called him names and walked off with another man, she'd—"If only you'd asked her to."

"She wouldn't have been happy here." At least he didn't think she would have. She wasn't farm raised, had stayed away from where they kept livestock and had never offered to help with chores. "She got out of here right quick, didn't she?"

"Oh, you're right, I'm sure," Jesse agreed. "She would have been miserable living here with a man she loved."

"Jesse," he said, and there was a headache forming there behind his eyes. Not enough sleep for nights on end, and the last thing he needed was the old man arguing – or agreeing – with him. He was a fool, they both knew that. There didn't seem much point in beating it into his head now. "She's gone. That's all that matters."

"She's gone," Jesse concurred. "Because you was too scared to ask her to stay. You wasn't ready to give up what you got."

"Yeah," he admitted, eyes fixed on the notches and scars etched into the old wooden table in front of him. Quiet for a second or two, and then his cup was being slid into his line of sight. Steam coming off the top, and he reached for it with both hands. Just let them warm there without picking it up.

"Well that's good, Luke, real good." The scolding was gone from Jesse's voice, and in its place was genuine encouragement. Somehow or other, his uncle was fine with him having treated the girl badly. "Because what you got here is family, and your family will always love you, no matter how big a fool you are. And they'll forgive you, too," the old man added. "For being surly and nasty." Which wasn't entirely fair. He might have spent too much time in that chair in the living room instead of out roaming the back roads of Hazzard, and he might have kept quiet, but then his Aunt Lavinia had always insisted that if he couldn't think of one nice thing to say, he should say nothing at all. And for three days, he hadn't come up with a single positive thought. "If you ask them to."

Silence again. He turned the cup in his hands, considered drinking from it, but that headache wasn't getting any better behind his eyes, and coffee might just make it worse.

"Now I know you got your reasons to be mad at Bo. I don't reckon you cared too much for how he went and put the General up in a bet without even saying nothing to you." No, he hadn't been a big fan of that particular choice on his cousin's part. "But I also don't figure you been all that easy to say nothing to anyway. You been at that boy, one way or another, since back in the fall."

Well. If that wasn't the dumbest thing Luke had ever heard.

"Are you saying it was okay for him to let that conniving little Frankie trick him into a bet, and then keep that little transaction to himself instead of telling me so I could have gotten us out of it, because I gave him a hard time about blowing up the outhouse?"

He had a cup, it sat on the mantelpiece as a grand monument to his stupidity – in letting a girl get under his skin, in protecting her with such stalwartness that he'd lost a derby to her, in accepting the prize for a race he hadn't won, in just standing there with Bo's arm around his shoulders while she walked away from him. So he was an idiot, he was a jackass, but Bo—Bo was worse.

"No. What he done was wrong and I told him so. And you already told him so, too, so I don't reckon you need to go telling him over and over again. Maybe he don't always think before he acts, but he ain't dumb and you only got to tell him something once."

The cup of coffee just kept getting turned in his hands as he fought the urge to dispute the notion that his cousin had any smarts at all.

"Look at me, Luke."

Grumpy bears should never be interrupted from their hibernation, but once they were awake it was best to do what they wanted unless you were fully willing to get mauled. Luke lifted his eyes away from the cup in his hands.

"Now I reckon you got a right to be mad at him, but if you really think it was that Frankie girl's jibes that made him take that bet, if you really think the way you been treating him didn't have a hand in it, you've got the heart of a turnip." Jesse drained the last of his own cup of coffee then, and stood. Patted him on his shoulder, winked and turned to walk away. "A small one."


	5. Deputies Duking it Out

**Chapter Five - Deputies Duking it Out**

They were idiots. Naked idiots.

There were meaner thoughts that his brain wanted to think, but he had more pressing problems at the moment.

"Are we gonna go after them, or are we going to just sit here all day?"

It was his fault anyway. The plan, what little of it there was, had been his. Two girls, two cars, one lake and one afternoon. Just a little light exercise, because they'd been working so hard lately. Spring planting and spring deliveries because folks up in the mountains liked to celebrate spring thaw by sitting on their porches with a bottle and watching the leaves pop out. And in the busiest season of the year, Daisy had chosen a new beau who was an erstwhile robber, and Cooter had made off with the President's limousine, forcing the Duke boys to pull both of their necks out of the sling. Yep, it was a tough life, driving moonshine at night a cruising around in a presidential limousine in the day – and if he could work out how to deliver their goods in a limousine, the Duke boys would be all set. Running moonshine in style.

But it today's activities had been more than a chance to relax, more than a reward for winning a hundred bucks in the snipe hunting contest that brought them here. It was a good old, brilliant Luke Duke idea. About how Bo needed to relearn the roving ways of Duke boys, how to experience girls without ever letting them get so deep under your skin that before you knew it, you were making crazy wagers with them. (Or letting them leave town with a piece of you that you pretty much figured you'd never see again. Maybe, just maybe, Bo had loved Jill, and if watching her leave had hurt Bo half as much as that last kiss from Amy had hurt Luke, well – it was about time the Duke boys got back to their natural state was about all he had to say in the matter.)

Because girls were soft things, like the fur on a rabbit. Fun to touch, but best never to get terribly attached to, because they weren't meant to stay in your life very long. They were easy on the eyes and the hands, they were like good whiskey, smooth with a little kick at the end. They were like clay, easily molded into—

They were sneaky critters, really, downright untrustworthy. When they weren't making off with your heart they were making off with your money. And your clothes.

Picnics were supposed to be simple things. A basket of chicken, a jug of lemonade, a shaker of salt, some plates and a napkin or two because there were crumbs to be dealt with. A blanket to put between the food and the grass, and if that same blanket also wound up beneath two sweaty bodies writhing together as one, well that was just happy coincidence. Sure, Daisy's fried chicken was good stuff (and a necessary ingredient to most picnics, which meant the boys had to stay on her good side at least three-quarters of the time) but when it came right down to it, the most important ingredient in a successful picnic was the blanket.

So when Maybelle and Cindy Lou, two fine looking specimens of the female variety, made the acquaintance of the Duke boys at the end of the annual spring snipe hunt, and possessed the college-girl brilliance to suggest a picnic where the eating part got skipped and the blanket immediately got used for better things, well it seemed like maybe the Duke boys were in for a change of luck. Goodbye to serious girls with all their strings to bind and demands of fidelity, who would make a man leave behind what he'd always known for the likes of her, and hello sweet freedom. Liberty from infuriating females, liberty from obligations, liberty from the prize money they'd just won and liberty from their clothes. Refreshing, really.

"It just so happens that I left my car keys in my pants pocket," seemed like a perfectly reasonable retort to Bo's ingenious query. "And right now, I ain't got no pants pocket."

"Since when," was the sound of Bo getting testy. Short fuse and heat of the vinyl seat beneath his bare backside. The boy was getting ready to explode. "Do we need keys to start a car?"

Deep breath, in-out. His cousin had the tiniest tolerance for frustration of anyone he'd ever known, but maybe just this once, Luke could understand what was going on over in that blonde brain. Naked in the seat of a car, that was the recipe for fun in every book he'd ever read, except that the person sitting next to you in an equal state of undress was not, repeat not, supposed to be your distinctly male cousin.

And, he had to admit, it had been his plan. At the start, anyway, it had been his plan, and if Bo had taken it over, had gotten a touch overeager at the notion of skinny dipping and been all too willing to shed his clothes with their hundred dollar winnings in his right front pocket, well he should have factored that possibility in at the outset. Bo never did have any use for pants when there were clearly willing girls in the vicinity.

"All right," he answered, going after the steering column.

Impatient puff of released breath there to his right, like hotwiring a car ought to be an instantaneous operation. And next time it would be, since he was mauling the steering column now. If they didn't care about cosmetics (oh, but Bo loved his cosmetics, a fine shampoo for the hair, a little conditioner, a lot of brushing, that soap he used to keep his hands soft and then there was cologne, way too much cologne) they could just leave these wires exposed for the next time some girls made off with their pants. Which, since he got treated to working with Bo's keen mind on a daily basis, ought to be sometime next week.

But it had been his plan.

Engine roaring to life, finally, and he slammed his foot down. Seemed like his snortingly impatient cousin over there had forgotten that he wasn't the only Duke boy that could drive. All that incivility rising up in him over where their pants were not, and Luke took it out on the blacktop around them. Tearing across it, leaving black scars along the width of the road, and he was going to take this mess (of his own making, oh but Bo has done his fair share, and maybe more than that) and stand it on its ear, he was going to get his clothes and his keys and his money and he was going to teach those girls a lesson about whose personal belongings you didn't mess with. Could just see the red convertible skidding to the bottom of the hill below them, skittering around a curve too fast all four wheels to stay on the ground, could hear the horn blow but that was inconsequential when the General was careening down toward the intersection and—

A grinding, violent halt.

"All right, get out of the car."

And so he sat in a hulk of metal that wouldn't go any further, not with how it had a stalled motor and a bashed in door, the result of an impact with the wrong vehicle, oh entirely the wrong vehicle.

Didn't matter that they'd had the right of way, that there was no good reason (only very, very bad reasons) that they shouldn't still be in pursuit of the girls.

"The only rights you got is the rights I'm gonna read you."

They were stuck right here. On the hot vinyl seat of an unmoving car, while they got informed that their next destination was about to be the county slammer. By one Rosco P. Coltrane.

"Let's see now, destroying county property," and then there was the list of charges. "Reckless driving. Speeding. Resisting arrest." The endless, ridiculous list of charges, that was. "Assaulting an officer, and—"

Sitting there with his big old cousin at his side, no place to go—

"Indecent—"

A mumbling, bumbling sheriff and—

"Exposure."

No clothes.

No matter how many times he'd told himself it was all his fault and his dumb plan that hadn't worked out, no matter how Jesse had pointed out to him that his heart was small and his temper huge, no matter how many times he'd tried to convince himself that he owed it to Bo to be a little more gentle, no one, not anyone on the planet, could be expected to maintain any amount of grace under these circumstances.

"Just, get out of there, get out of the car." Especially not when the metal trim around the General's window, which had been in the sun ever since they'd parked up by the lake in the fist place, was even hotter than the seat.

* * *

><p>Fighting, he'd learned long ago, was a wonderfully noisy and messy business. Nothing to be sly or demure or dainty about, no reason for sneakiness. Those squeamish about blood had best step aside, because the dust was going to fly and skin would get broken. Fists and feet and fury.<p>

And sometimes inanimate objects needed to be taught a lesson, too. About what they were meant to do, and why they even had the privilege of existing. Like tools that served a very simple function and if they couldn't do their undemanding little jobs, well, why did they get stored in the barn instead of tossed on the scrap heap?

Take the ax in his hands now. It had a single purpose, quite simple when it came down to it – to split the log in front of him. But either the ax was lazy or the log stubborn because—"Dang it!"—they were insisting on cleaving to each other, steel head buried in wood and refusing to budge.

"Bo," Jesse warned, as if he'd really cussed or said what was on his mind instead of biting his tongue.

Speaking of tongues, Luke's was hanging out the corner of his mouth like it did whenever he was concentrating. On splitting his own log, at least that was what he was pretending. But every one of the four of them (because along with Jesse who was sitting maybe fifteen feet away milking Bonnie Mae, there was also Daisy just beyond that, waxing her car) here knew that what his older cousin was doing was concentrating on not laughing. Just so he could claim innocence when Bo smacked him later.

He could explain how the inanimate objects were out to thwart him, and how _dang _wasn't anything Uncle Jesse hadn't wedged in between dagnabbits and dadburns himself every now and again. Also that it was solidly spring, that they'd spent last week planting and he wasn't any too happy about those same muscles he'd used back then getting pulled all over again right now in the chopping. Of ash, which burned without much scent or smoke, making it a fine choice for their midnight cooking activities. But it wasn't as easily chopped as maple or oak and why was Luke over there splitting it like it was nothing more than toothpicks?

So he held his tongue, then used a boot for leverage to pull the ax free. Set the log upright again, turning it this way and that to figure out the lay of the grain and where, precisely, he wanted the ax head to embed itself. Waited for everyone else to get back to minding their own business before raising his arms, weight of the tool steady in his hands as he brought it down for another blow. Missed his mark, splintering off a chip no thicker than bark in one direction while the rest scooted over to the other.

"Shut up," he mumbled to what Luke didn't say as his cousin deftly stuck out a foot to keep the log from tipping over and rolling off the chopping block. Got an innocent shrug in return while old Luke made a fine show of going back to his own work.

A solid thwack echoed across the farmyard as the jerk's next log split tidily down the middle. Perfect kindling with one blow, and Bo was setting up to go again with a log that wobbled, and a kink in his shoulder.

"Spook," Luke muttered just as Bo's swing was at the top of its arc, getting ready to crash down at full force. It was an old game, left over from when they were nothing more than shirtless little brats with ribs sticking out all over the place, collecting firewood at the edges of their property where the trees were thick and the shadows deep. Impressionable and innocent back then, and Luke had told him that there were goblins and spooks on the other side of the fence line, where their farmland ended and the Fentons' began. One day his big cousin had pointed over to a shifting shape not 20 yards away, and Bo had stood there frozen, watching it. Until it lifted and moved and he was solidly sure that it was hungry and little boys were on its menu. He'd run back to the house hollering all the way. _Luke__ got __et __by __a __spook._ That was what he'd told their aunt when she'd caught him at the splintered steps of their porch, admonishing him about how he should never yell like that unless he was bleeding or broken or otherwise in danger of losing his life. _Luke __got __et __by __a__ spook_, he'd insisted, and then his cousin had crossed into the farmyard, just ambling along, laughing at the notion of gullible little boys who believed that sheets blowing on a neighbor's clothesline could be ghosts.

It got to be one of those jibes that the kid Luke once was could toss at him when he felt like being subtle. When he didn't want a whipping, but he did want Bo's face to go red with annoyance and frustration, Luke would say something about getting eaten by spooks. It got abbreviated over time, until he'd throw the word _spook_ into a fake cough, or say it with a frozen-lipped smile. But any talk of child-devouring ghouls had disappeared with their boyhood, never to be heard again. Until today.

"Luke!" he crabbed, sinking the axe straight into the chopping block without even coming close to the log he was meant to be splitting.

Another shrug from the man to his left, as good as saying he was only trying to help.

"Boys," Jesse warned.

"Yes, sir," Luke answered, the very definition of obedience when he had hardly even bothered to call their Uncle _sir_ since returning from the service.

"Yes, sir," Bo echoed though he wasn't entirely sure what he was yessing.

Took some brute strength to get the axe back out of the chopping block where he'd sunk it so deeply (and if only he could hit the wily ash log in front of him that solidly, it'd have no choice but to fall into two perfectly neat pieces) a well-placed foot for leverage, and he stumbled back when the tool released itself. Glowered at every human and goat within sight in case it had crossed their minds to laugh at him, but aside from a raised eyebrow from Daisy, there was nothing.

Back to his log, raising the ax over his head concentrating on the task at hand. Not at all concerned about the man to his left, paying no mind to the way Luke's ax wasn't swinging, certainly not waiting for another snide word to get mumbled in his direction. Not expecting with every fiber of his being to be mocked, not even considering anything but the ax, the trajectory, the wood—

"Dang it," he complained about nothing at all. Slammed the axe back into the chopping block, and turned to glare at his cousin. Left hand on his hip, right finger jutting at the blue shirt across the jerk's chest and he wouldn't be responsible for what came next if smugness himself dared to feign innocence. "Luke."

Silence. Not a quibble from Luke nor a grumble from Jesse. Daisy's eyes were probably half bugged out of her head, but he wasn't looking there, didn't have an ounce of attention to spare in her direction. His chest was tight and heaving with the effort to stand there unmoving, not to let loose a fist or holler about injustices or—he didn't even know what he wanted to do, but he was pretty sure that whatever it was, it would get him whipped.

A sigh from his older cousin, maybe acknowledgement of the inevitability, and, "Barn, Bo." Just a suggestion, quiet, but without menace. _If__ you __want__ to __fight __me, __we __got__ to __get__ away __from __the __old - timer._ Who hadn't ever really let them go at it, and they hadn't ever really made any real effort to either, not since they were too small to do any real damage to each other.

"All right," he agreed. With his mouth, and then his finger, which came out of its point. With his legs that started striding across the farmyard in the sort of long steps that no one could keep up with unless they trotted, and Luke would never lower himself to such a notion. Hell, he was half still in denial that Bo had outgrown him, that the little runt he used to complain couldn't keep up could now outstride him without any real effort. Besides, his older cousin was probably lagging behind to exchange looks with their uncle, to be silently challenged about what was going to happen once they got out of his sight. One of them had to do it, and Bo didn't figure he had the patience just now.

But when he got into the shadows of the barn, when he'd stalked right out to the middle aisle where the space was open and neither the stalls nor the ladder that led up to the loft ought to get in the way of a brawl, when he turned around to wait, Luke was already following into the space after him. Pausing for a moment to close one wide door, then the other, and yeah, that was a good idea. The last thing they needed was for Daisy to get a notion to come barging in with intent to get between them and wind up getting herself hurt.

But once they'd been properly sealed off from the outdoor world, where the sky was that clear blue that only happened about twice a year, where the sun was warm, but the breezes cool and the squirrels scampered over roots and rocks in an attempt to catch each other, Luke commenced to settle his shoulder against a supporting beam and fold his arms across his chest. Leaning. Waiting.

"Well?" he prompted. _Let __me __have __it._

"You're a jackass," Bo informed him, in case he hadn't realized all on his own. It was a start, a fraction of the flaws he was willing to list for his cousin. But his mouth, it couldn't be trusted to get things right. His fists were far more reliable, and he felt them clench, just begging his brain for permission to do the telling. If only Luke would stand up to his full height and present his chin for the hitting. But old cool-as-a-cucumber just kept right on standing there. No movement, no acknowledgement. "And you ain't always so smart, either."

It should have been enough. That kind of thing would have set Jesse to hollering and Daisy to lecturing, and most days it would have gotten Luke to answer him back, to draw inferences about Bo's brain and tiny vegetables, to give him the excuse he needed to start swinging.

Because that was all he wanted. Just the slightest twitch, a hint that Luke was willing to hit him back. Over firewood or insults, he didn't care which. He was just tired of this thing smoldering in his chest, this need to prove – something – to Luke, to make him stand up and take notice that Bo wasn't his little cousin anymore and he didn't have to take anything from Luke that he didn't want to.

And Luke had himself a temper, but he could do this other thing, too. Utter patience, like Saturday afternoons along a river bank, waiting on the fish to find his hook. Or like he was hatching one of his plots, watching and waiting for things to unfold exactly as he knew they would.

"Or right. Half the time you ain't—" and this was why his cousin was infuriating. Because being still like this, listening without even halfway offering a fight, was the sort of torture that only Luke Duke could inflict. The kind of silence that made you confess to all the dark little hollows in your soul. "Even right, but you don't never quit. You just keep on," making me feel like an idiot, like right now. "Going on and on about it."

"Like," Luke prompted, and Bo should have hit him for it. Yeah, he would have been in the wrong to do it, and there would have been all manner explaining to Jesse why he'd done it anyway, then forced apologies to Luke afterward. But it would have been worth it. Because that halfway understanding, that nearly gentle encouraging from his cousin, that was cheating. On a grand scale.

"Like Jill!" he burst out with, and it was all over. His fists would never get a chance, because his dang mouth was going to give everything up, right here and now. "Okay, so maybe I ain't sorry that I didn't go off to Macon, all right? Maybe that wasn't the best idea I ever had, but you ain't had no right to go off listing every reason I was an idiot for wanting her." See now, that part didn't make him sound smart. "Or Roxanne. Yeah, she was a revenuer. Yeah, she could have been dangerous to have around too much, but she was fun. I ain't dumb, Luke," wasn't as convincing as he wanted it to be, not in the middle of this lousy case he was making. "I wasn't gonna get serious with her. I just wouldn't have minded taking her juking a few more times." Or a bunch, and if he could teach her the difference between water and whiskey and keep her sober long enough, he might have wanted to take her out to the pond afterward and taken the time to teach her a few other Hazzard traditions. "It ain't like I loved her or nothing. It wasn't like you and—" no movement over there, except maybe a slight tightening of Luke's arms across his chest. "I'm sorry about Amy, though." And he was, now that she was gone. When she was here he might not have had two good things to say about her, and he might have figured she should have left town and taken that loud-mouthed mechanic with her a lot earlier than she did. But now that she was gone and Luke had shut himself down and never quite come all the way back since, he was sorry. A little. "But you didn't have to be such a jerk about the outhouse," and the errant bits of car magazine that had scattered themselves around the Duke property when he'd blown it up, "just because your girl left you." Though when he thought about it, the outhouse had come before the girl. Oh well.

See, this was where a fistfight was preferable. Because here he was, spilling ugly, nasty, mixed-up truth all over the barn when he figured it'd be a lot less messy if he and Luke could just spill each other's blood. All right, so they'd have to wash their own shirts after to get all the stains out. And then they'd have to ice the wounds so they wouldn't swell enough to show at church and wind up feeding the rumor mill. But those things would be a lot easier to deal with than all this confessing he was doing right now.

"And you didn't have to go trying to take Mary Beth from me." Whose last name was not Price, despite how she'd introduced herself to them at the Springville Courthouse. A lie, but then they were halfway in disguise themselves, having been literally been caught with their pants down and tricked into wearing Hazzard deputy uniforms, so they couldn't hold that against her. "I mean, it ain't like we had plans," yet, but then that was why Bo had wanted to be the one who transported her from Hazzard back to Springville after all was said and done. So they could get to know each other better and let whatever was going to follow… follow. "And maybe she wasn't no good for neither of us." What with how she'd let Rocky Marlowe, Public Enemy number one and his and Luke's responsibility, go free so he could try to kill them all. "But I had designs on her and you didn't have to go getting in the way."

And well, that was it, he reckoned. He had no more complaints and Luke must've figured he was done too, because he stood up out of that lean.

"All right," he said.

"All right what?" came out as a huff. He didn't want to be done being mad. Mad was good, it felt righteous and powerful. Anger was his friend, and it had abandoned him in his time of need, leaving him empty. And tired.

"All right, about Mary Beth." Which was easy to say, since it was too late now. She was gone, and neither of them had gotten to drive her back to Springville because Daisy had gotten in the middle. (Ah, there was a tiny bit of anger, coming back. Very safe anger, because it was directed at Daisy, but he wouldn't ever go confronting her like this. She wielded frying pans, and she knew how to use them, too.) "I reckon that if you make your move on a girl first, I can manage to step aside." Which was half agreement and half patronizing, and it didn't matter. Because he was sincere about it, which meant Bo had a clear shot at any girl he wanted and he didn't figure there was anything more important than that.

A handshake to seal the deal, then a quick hug to prove there were no leftover hard feelings.

"Thanks, cuz." And the grin he let loose at that, well he figured it was bright enough to light up the world.


	6. Shine, Roses and Rustlers

_**Author's note:** Hey y'all! Glad that you're enjoying this as a trip down memory lane. Fair warning (or a promise?) that we'll be departing from canon up here a ways. Not yet, though._

_Thanks for joining me on this trip!_

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter Six - 'Shine, Roses and Rustlers<strong>

There was a reason, Luke figured, that most cars got called "she." They had their own brand of wiles and they could make a man's head spin with their tight curves and sexy lines just as well as any human girl ever did.

Exhibit A in the proof of this little thesis wasn't, for once, Bo. But he didn't have to look far to find it, red-faced and dark eyed, proud jut to the chin and spitting into his own hand, Uncle Jesse. Followed by Exhibit B, Jefferson Davis Hogg, following suit.

Not that his cousin, who was long on body and short on brains, was precisely innocent in all of this. He'd started it just as sure as if he'd been one of the two old men in question himself, squabbling over the long-gone past when they were skinny and had hair, and on approximately the same side of the law. They weren't anymore, though Boss Hogg didn't know the half of what the Dukes still did. They had, after all, carefully cultivated the notion that Jesse was retired from his moonshining craft, and they only had to cross their fingers a little over that twist of the truth. The old man _had_ quit driving a few years back, even if he did still brew and sell his fine concoction. Good old J.D. Hogg fully suspected it, too, but all anyone knew for sure was that black cars skimmed from one end of Appalachia to the other most nights. Some got successfully stopped by local law or revenuers, and a percentage of those contained illegal liquor products. But of those cars stopped and searched, none had ever contained Dukes of any generation.

As to Boss Hogg himself, he mostly gave up the liquor business. He had other ways of earning money these days, and they didn't include sitting out in the woods all night, listening for the crack of a twig (or the shattering of his sanity) or slipping through the night in a car the color of fog, foot to the floor and muttering prayers for his own safety. In fact, the Commissioner had gotten so fat that it was hard to imagine there being room for both him and a steering wheel in the front seat of a standard-sized vehicle. But there he was, telling Rosco to look the other way while he grabbed Jesse's spit-wet palm in his own and gave it a vigorous shake.

The two old men, whose reflexes got lost somewhere around the time that they started needing reading glasses, had just agreed to a race. A moonshine-running race, no less. And all because Bo had felt compelled to rub Boss's nose in the fact that Jesse always had been the better driver.

Sure it was true, and if asked directly, Luke's Duke honesty would have compelled him to agree with Bo's assessment. But since no one had been inquiring or even discussing the superiority of one driver over another, since they'd all just been sitting around enjoying some fading and scratched old home movies and laughing at the way men wore their hair back then, since it had been an easygoing evening for which even their uncle had changed out of his work overalls and into some loose-fitting comfortable clothing, there was no reason for Bo to go getting the whole town worked up.

"Everybody in this room knows that Uncle Jesse is the best moonshine runner in the world," were blurted words from a six-foot-and-change, blonde, bragging brat and elicited mumbles and rumbles of loose agreement. Until Boss Hogg had looked to Rosco to defend his honor and bumbling fool had gone ahead and done it. Ancient and halfway stately men, with more belly than brains, and now there was going to be a race. Between a pair of half-decrepit one-time moonshine runners.

Which meant cars, and sure, it was perfectly safe for Boss to go resurrecting the Gray Ghost from his past, what with how that car hadn't been out from under a tarp in years and no revenuer had had cause to lay eyes on it since the man laid it to rest a decade or more ago. The Dukes lacked for that sort of luxury, considering that Sweet Tilly still prowled the night and ought never be exposed to the light of day. Best that the revenuers chasing down that old black matte Ford could only guess that it might be Dukes behind the wheel, and not have any reason to know it for sure.

Bo had, with all the skill in his blonde little soul, gotten Jesse to embroil himself in a race that he could not run.

Sure, sometime before the heat of summer had begun to bake the land, Luke had made himself a promise. About being more tolerant, remembering that even if his cousin's body had grown to adult size, there was still an innocent kid inside his brain. The kind who believed in the obviousness of right and wrong, never got lost in the dingy gray areas between black and white, all cobwebs and shadows. Felt things with the full conviction of his heart in a way that Luke hadn't since war had taken him from Hazzard and turned everything he'd ever understood upside down and inside out. If those shady places between the starkness of Bo's perception of the world gave Luke loopholes to slip through as he negotiated the tricky business of life, they also left him looking at grimy recesses where Bo saw bright sunshine. And he didn't much figure it would do anyone a whole lot of good for his cousin to get stuck in dark thoughts. So Luke had resolved to bite his tongue instead of pointing out that Bo's brains were constructed entirely out of sawdust. Most days.

This, right here, was his reward. A few months of being lax, not keeping his cousin in check after that sad little scene in the barn where he'd just about poured out his heart, and Bo had gone and swung Jesse over to joining him in idiocy.

"Count ten, Jesse, please count ten," Luke had all but prayed in an echo of the advice his uncle had always given him (of course, back then it had come complete with the threat of whipped backside), but it hadn't worked. There would be a race. Into Hatchapee County, no less, with moonshine in the trunk. With a car that Jesse couldn't use, and even as the deal was sealed with a spit-shake, Luke held out hope. That when pride drained away and all that was left was cold, hard logic, Jesse would see the better part of wisdom and get out of the race.

He should have known better. Pride wasn't something Dukes could ever let go of, and furthermore, they were a family with friends. Good friends, the kind who would just up and put a four-hundred-forty-one cubic inch engine into the frame of an old, black hunk of tin, and offer it up as a racing car (or a death trap) for an old man who didn't halfway know the trouble he was digging himself into. That was Cooter, aiding and abetting the whole danged bunch of them in their foolish ways.

So the race was on, and Luke reckoned that there was no way a man was meant to keep his temper when all of his kin had gone off and lost their minds. That he and Bo picked up sniping at each other where they'd left off a few months ago was inevitable. Grousing little whispers as they stood not thirty feet from the old man in question, fixing porch screen (and maybe they just ought to give in and board the thing up, what with how they spent more time replacing screen than actually sitting out here) but mostly just complaining and otherwise looking for trouble.

"Oh, I suppose now you're going to try to tell me it's all my fault." Yep, his cousin was a genius.

"You suppose right, unless you can get him out of this thing you got him into." A man could hope, and if there was anyone who'd ever been able to make their uncle do something he didn't want to, it was his youngest. Still wrapped around Bo's little finger even though that finger wasn't exactly so little anymore.

"I got him into?" But there was no point. Bo wouldn't admit fault, and furthermore, he wanted Jesse to make this crazy run across one county and into another, then back again. Because it wouldn't be enough to risk the chance of getting caught with moonshine and ruining the family business, no Bo wanted to see his uncle take his life into his hands, too.

And Jesse wanted to do it. "Jesse Duke don't never back down from a challenge," he interrupted a perfectly good argument between his nephews to point out. "Especially not one from J.D. Hogg."

Bad got worse, once the old man started cruising around in that car of Cooter's. Black Tilly, he decided to call her, which was just one more foolish notion piled on top of the heap. They already had a car named Tilly and they didn't need to go insulting her by sharing her name around, not when they still counted on her to keep them safe through dangerous activities two or three nights a week. And their uncle drove the new Tilly like he meant it, too. Like he loved her as much as the fine old girl they kept in the barn until they were ready to put her to work. Tore up the ground pulling wild stunts, fishtailing and spinning out bootleg turns like a man half his age, up on two wheels as if he didn't know better.

Until she up and died on him, and then whatever reins Luke had kept on his temper came off with all due speed.

"Poor thing. I don't know whether to fix it or bury it," was the clever observation of the town mechanic and the fool who'd given Jesse the car in the first place.

"Fix it," Luke growled back at him. Because the oldster was bound and determined to run this race. And if the new Tilly couldn't carry him, he'd no doubt consider using the old one. Or, even worse, get the fine idea to drive the General Lee. "Soon," he added, because Cooter would have been content to sit there for hours, just scratching his head in puzzlement over a dead car.

"Yesterday," came back at him, with an utter lack of amusement.

And maybe, he had to admit to himself, he'd just missed the give and take of an argument. Maybe he felt cramped and confined unless he could be disagreeing with someone. In particular, Bo.

But when he, Bo and Cooter got down and dirty (really dirty, because what had killed the poor car was swamp water in the fuel tank, and there wasn't any way that it could have gotten there by itself) and he reminded his brilliant cousin that the race was entirely his fault and therefore it'd be Bo's responsibility to stand guard over and protect the car until the starting pistol went off, the brat had balked.

"Luke, you just don't quit." And with the precision timing of a one-time moonshine runner, Jesse happened upon them right as Bo was voicing that particular complaint. Forcing them, of course, to tell a not-quite lie, more like a roundabout truth. _Just a little dirt in the fuel line, Jesse,_ they'd all agreed with a smile. And the second the story had been accepted and the old man had jauntily bounced away, whistling to himself about the fun of running a race he was sure he'd win, Luke went right back to glowering at his cohorts, neither of whom seemed to understand the seriousness of their respective duties.

Relative peace reigned after that, at least until somewhere after midnight when he found himself in the kitchen, still nursing a cup cold coffee from hours ago.

"What's he doing out there?" came the startling voice from the archway into the living room.

"Shouldn't you be sleeping?" Luke accused, and it might not have been the wisest thing he'd ever done. But Jesse ought to know better than to sneak up on a man who was watching his cousin watch an unmoving car.

"Well, I reckon it's up to me whether I want to be sleeping or not," Jesse chastised. "And you ain't answered my question."

"He's fine out there, Jesse," wasn't exactly the response his uncle had demanded, but he was willing to put it out there on the off-chance that it might be accepted.

"Of course he is." The words were agreeable enough, even if the tone challenged Luke's very sanity in saying such a thing out loud. "With you in here keeping an eye on him. Luke," came from closer than the other words had been, lumbering footsteps of an exhausted old grizzly that really was just about sick to death of getting out of bed to deal with unruly cubs. "Sometimes I think you just want us all to _think_ you got a turnip for a heart. But you ain't fooling no one." His mug got snatched out from the loose hold his fingers had on it, tipped to the side and scrutinized by his uncle. "If you're going to stay up all night, you probably ought to make more of this."

"There's still some in the pot," Luke answered and left it be. If his uncle wanted him to drink more coffee, he reckoned he could oblige. "Enough for two." Just in case Jesse wanted some, too.

"Now Luke, I've got to drive tomorrow," came the scolding. "And I reckon I ain't got nothing to worry about, what with how you're making Bo watch the car, and then there's you watching over Bo." A wink in that voice and then his mug was back. A second one followed.

"Thought you said you wasn't having any."

"I ain't." The man loomed over him, waiting to see how long it would be before his message sunk in, when of course it didn't take any time at all. It wasn't like Dukes were known for their subtlety.

The air that puffed out of his mouth was somewhere between laugh and sigh as he stood and took hold of the extra mug of coffee. Got one step toward the door, and that voice came from behind him.

"Luke, I reckon it's all right if you boys want to make sure my fuel line don't get_ dirty_ again." Sometimes it just didn't pay to try to keep things peaceful and quiet. Luke had been sure his uncle didn't need to know that his car had been deliberately sabotaged; old Jesse must've made up his own mind that there was no reason to let his boys pull the wool over his eyes. "And if staying up all night is the only way you can figure to do that, then by all means, go ahead. But the two of you might as well keep each other company. Your cousin ain't never liked sitting up at a still alone all night, and I don't reckon he likes sitting out there with a car by himself neither."

That made his head turn back quick, and, "He's fine," Luke defended. Because he was, because there was no way Bo would really think Luke would leave him out on guard duty without being nearby in case he needed help.

"Maybe he is and maybe he ain't," Jesse countered. "I just figure that if you all are going to watch over me tomorrow like you're watching over that car tonight, you're going to do a much better job of it if you ain't bickering and sniping at each other. You boys work together, and there ain't nothing you can't do." A wide hand patting his shoulder, like telling him he was a good boy for learning a lesson. And he couldn't be sure that he really had, couldn't swear that it was any different from all the other times when he'd gone and done what his uncle told him to, head shaking all the way. "Good night, boy."

So he took Bo some coffee, which the boy didn't much like, anyway. And then he sat himself up on the hood of the car and watched the moon pass through the wisps of clouds as Bo talked. About racing, about their chances in the upcoming Choctaw Derby, about whether there might be any NASCAR scouts coming out this way anytime soon, about the girls he'd get when he became a famous driver on the circuit someday. And he reckoned it was fine, all that talk, if it made the night go faster. Maybe it was even good, and maybe it worked out just about like Jesse said. Because when the day dawned and old timer's moonshine race got underway, he and Bo worked together smooth as glass to make sure that Boss Hogg didn't take any unfair advantages, and that Jesse and the car he'd named after their moonshine runner emerged from the race safe, sound, and without any speeding tickets.

* * *

><p>Girls, he figured, weren't worth it. (Oh, but they were, if only you could make your way past the looking and flirting and all the way to the having. In quiet and private places where your kin couldn't drag you away or roll their eyes and tell you to come on, there were better places to be.) Girls that got you kicked in the shin by your aging uncle, just because you tried to comfort them about failed marriages, they were the ones that weren't worth it. Sherry Tolliver, newly back in Hazzard, staying with her cousin Burl, and she was cute in the same way a kitten was. Small, warm, soft, fun to pet, but since he didn't figure she'd want to be relegated to the barn to chase mice, he'd never bring her home. Jesse felt the need to kick him over the few kind words he'd tried to say anyway, leaving him with nothing to do but look the fool for yelping about something that no one else witnessed happening.<p>

And there was no one that saw fit to go booting him in the shins when the pretty little thing found herself getting an unwanted ride across the Tolliver's pastures on the back of a spooked horse. No, they just stood around watching while he mounted another horse to save her. The lesson, near as he could figure it, was that it was perfectly reasonable for him to risk life and limb for a girl, but not to talk to her. It was a twist of logic worthy Luke in one of his surlier moods, like the one last spring that had somehow ensured that Bo would be the one in the driver's seat of an ice cream truck that was on its way to China through the quicksand at the bottom of Black Hollow Lake.

It was enough to make a man do some serious thinking about why he put up with his kin considering the way they picked at and embarrassed him. Except that somewhere along the way to building that head of steam, he remembered that there were other things that made living with meddlesome family worthwhile. Like Daisy's habit of cooking sausage for breakfast, because it was his favorite, or the fact that Uncle Jesse took them in, fed them, clothed them, saw that they got an education and learned a trade, and kicked them in the shins when they said dumb things, even if they weren't technically his own kids.

And then there was Luke. Who had spent young summers teaching him to run wild along the banks of the creek, kicking up mud and chasing after paper sailboats that they'd made, Luke's larger fingers pressing down on his childishly thin ones, making sure the creases were firm. Who had listened as he told crazy tales into the darkness that stretched out between their two beds, words slipping into the shadows that Bo never could stand, that he tried to make go away with his endless night prattling. (Okay, so sometimes Luke told him to shut up and sleep, then rolled over and took to snoring. As if a body could expect to sleep through that. It was a good thing that most times his chatter was more agreeable to them both.) Luke had listened to his dreams about NASCAR, and then after he'd gone off to war and come back numb to just about everything, he'd picked himself up and stood shoulder to shoulder with Bo for weeks onto months, building the General. And he figured that just maybe all of that was worth an earful of grousing and superiority, of times when Luke just about dismissed any consideration that Bo had a brain at all.

Sherry liked Luke just fine. A little more than she liked Uncle Jesse, who she hugged as thanks for the way the Dukes had seen fit to forgo a few luxuries, throwing in their fortunes together with the Tolliver's and gambling on the outcome of a horserace. She'd kissed Luke, all prim and proper on the cheek, with just enough lip in it to make a man wonder how deep her fondness of him went, but any questions of that nature died when she slung her arms around Bo and kissed him full on the mouth.

Until, that was, the horse got her next kiss, and Bo got the first inkling of what was going on here. Somehow or other Manassas (who as fine looking, Bo had to admit, but still had four legs and a tail even if he could run like the wind) had become the most attractive and sought-after man in Hazzard. Just look how Boss and Rosco drooled at the sight of him. Cletus, somehow or other got roped into lusting after the horse, too, and then there were those strangers-turned-rustlers from the Dunlap Horse Ranch that wanted him. Blonde, blue-eyed Bo Duke, rabidly pursued by most women, envied by almost every man, had been summarily shoved aside to make room for a fellow that left smelly messes in straw, and couldn't even comb his own mane.

Even Luke, after everyone else had made their play for Manassas, showed his own brand of love for the horse. Riding him cross country on a course that led to jumping more fences than strictly necessary, and the two of them melded together like one creature. Bo drove a horse trailer off in the other direction just so there'd be two pretty faces for the out-of-town rustlers to follow and get confused by, but as soon as he'd lost the fools, he climbed into the General with Cooter to check on what Luke was up to. Watching his cousin ride, that slight smile on his face as the car pulled up even with the horse, that quick wink of an eye before Luke went back to a peaceful observation of the trail in front of him while the horse bore him closer to the Hazzard fairgrounds, and it was enough in that slice of time between one crisis and another to make Bo wonder.

Whether Luke was born for the same things as him, whether a car would ever hold as much excitement for his older cousin as a horse, a farm, the land. And whether, when the right win came along on the dirt track circuit and NASCAR finally sat up and took notice of a couple of Hazzard boys that could make a car do what no one else could, Luke would balk. The sun and the soil, the mountains and the wildlife might just conspire together to try to keep his cousin right here.

But eventually, after another wild drive over ruts and dips while Luke glided smoothly on the horse, they got to the fairgrounds. And when all was said and done, arrests made, races won, trophies lifted into the air and photos taken, after the money had been carefully counted out and divided in front of as many witnesses as possible, Manassas got bedded down and left to his stable, Jesse and Burl got left on the Dukes' porch while 'the kids' went out for a little celebrating at the Boar's Nest, where Daisy got left behind the bar and Luke got left back at the table to watch as Bo and Sherry Tolliver danced close and warm, sweat mingling as they nestled together in one small corner of the floor. A few traded kisses, and there was no horse there nuzzling its way between them, no reason to worry about NASCAR dreams and whether they'd even come true, because all was right in his world.


	7. Ghostly Visitations and Meeting Cale

**Chapter Seven - Ghostly Visitations and Meeting Cale**

He couldn't imagine. Not really, not in the sort of vivid color his thought processes would have to undertake if they were going to begin to mimic reality.

"Hey Luke," he whispered, because it had been quiet too long and the thoughts had started to squirm around in the dim corners of his mind again. Recesses and nooks that should never be disturbed, and then today had gone ahead and happened, and there was no stopping the darkness from invading. This must be what it was like to be Luke. "What's happening?"

"Nothing," was just a mumble, halfway swallowed by the seat back between them.

"Maybe we shouldn't wait," he suggested, because he was pretty sure he had the imprint of the nylon seat seam on his cheek, there was a cramp in his bent leg, and he was sick and tired of his own brain.

But, "Give it a minute, Bo," came his answer.

Enos, as usual, was in the way. Innocence bumbling from one end of the Sheriff's station to the other (but old Enos didn't know yet, was still carrying sorrow around in his heart like a dead weight that was too heavy for Bo to even imagine) when the plan called for Rosco to be alone.

"Yeah, okay," he murmured back, but he didn't mean it. Nothing was okay.

Dead, suddenly and irrevocably yanked away from family and friends and lost somewhere to the great beyond. Most of the town still thought that of them, believed that he and Luke were caught in the reeds and mud at the bottom of Hazzard Pond.

Bo reckoned he knew death well enough. They'd first met when he was too young to utter a greeting or offer a hand to shake. Just an infant, and he didn't remember much of anything about it. Luke did, he carried fuzzy pictures in his brain, the kind that might have been taken by a person too eager and unskilled to hold the camera still. Blurry images of their parents, his, Daisy's, Luke's. Of big hands raising him high into the air and him squealing to either be put down or to be lifted higher, to be tossed up and caught again in the arms of men he loved and trusted and reckoned would always be there for him. Luke could say that Bo's daddy had a deep voice and that his mommy never wore heels because she was already too tall, and Jesse would confirm it as accurate. And Luke remembered (but never talked about, didn't even consider discussing) the day that they didn't come home. Luke knew loss.

And Bo knew death, but not as a sudden thief of those he loved. When Lavinia had left them it was after a year of knowing she was going to, and those last months of watching her deteriorate hadn't been any fun, but they'd served their purpose. By the time she died, there was no arguing or pleading with a greater power to make the dying stop. It was, everyone could agree even if they didn't like it one bit, her time.

Daisy wasn't enough older than him to remember how own parents, either. She hadn't known what it was like to wake up in the same house as someone one morning, to do chores and eat breakfast side-by-side, to have that repetitive squabble over who got the last biscuit without realizing that tomorrow there'd be too many biscuits and too few mouths. Not until today, that was, and Bo couldn't wrap his mind around it. The pain, like that cramp in his leg now, ebbing then throbbing, a moment of respite and then there it was again. His kin, holding a wake in their own living room, keeping the mourners' mason jars full of moonshine, and for moments at a time they probably lost themselves to being hosts until it hit them all over again why they were doing it.

Maybe his kin should have known better. Jesse knew sudden loss and he knew his nephews. Maybe he should have felt the subtle difference between having clear knowledge that someone was gone and only being told so by such an unreliable witness as Rosco P. Coltrane. He definitely should have thought twice about whether Bo would have driven the Duke boys straight into the water when there were a million other evasive maneuvers he could have pulled off, with his eyes closed and one hand tied behind his back. And then there was the questionable evidence of their deaths. Apparently Enos had emerged from his underwater search of the submerged General with Luke's dripping jeans held in one hand, and Bo's shirt clenched in the other. Since when did drowned bodies slip right out of their clothes and disappear into the rushes of a pond?

But all the logic in the world didn't stand up when pain set into your heart and didn't let go, he guessed. He had to guess, because he didn't know, didn't ever want to know. Missing someone, okay, he understood that. Mourning, (and he supposed he'd mourned his parents his whole life in whatever way it was that you missed what you never had) he could grasp. But having loss hit you that hard and that fast, like that time the snow sitting on the roof of the barn had let go all at once and come crashing down on him, cold, wet, heavy, miserable – he couldn't imagine and he didn't want to think about it anymore.

"Luke." It wasn't a whine, more like a request. _Can we just go ahead and spook Rosco and Enos all at once, because I need us to do something so I can stop thinking_. Even falling off the back of Cooter's pickup truck on their way back into town a few hours ago would have been preferable to lying here on the General's front seat, thinking.

"Just a sec," was relief getting put off just that much longer.

Luke knew death inside and out. He'd seen it more ways than any of the rest of them, with formal introductions coming when he was just four, and then a whole bunch of howdy-dos after that when he went off to war. He knew that it only took seconds for everything to shatter into such tiny pieces that there would be no way of ever finding all the shards, much less putting them back together again. He'd seen blood and gore on a scale that Bo couldn't even fathom, and there he was right now, lying in the General's back seat and peering through a scope he'd constructed out of toilet paper rolls and an old box with a set of cracked mirrors at odd angles inside of it. Peaceful almost, like it was any plain old Tuesday and he was just lying on a creek bank, fishing reel propped next to him and a cowboy hat over his eyes, pretending not to snooze. As if they hadn't spent the morning running across a good chunk of the county naked (or nearly so, because even the clothes they'd stolen off a scarecrow when their skinny-dipping had gone awry were small and had holes in inconvenient places) only to get thankfully home in one piece and find a wake in progress in their own house. For them, they were dead, didn't they know that? Everyone else knew it, and the only ones who'd been let in on the unknowing of that known fact were Jesse, Daisy and Cooter. Everyone else thought they were gone and had the regrets coursing through their veins like the moonshine they'd been served at the wake. Just imagine being old Emma Tisdale in the Post Office, sorting through mail then looking up at the clock _– it's three-ten, and Jesse's boys are dead. How sad._ Or Rosco, how much worse was it to be Rosco, who lived with the belief that he'd all but done the killing himself?

"Luke," he said again, more urgency behind it. They couldn't stay dead, they couldn't—

"Hand me the CB, Bo," came his answer with a chuckle. "There goes Enos, off to the café." More laughter as the haunting of one Rosco P. Coltrane began.

And it was crazy, there was no other way explaining it. Luke lived, every single day of his life, with the kind of thoughts that had only crossed Bo's mind over the course of a few hours on this one afternoon. And sure, he was a sourpuss, impatient and sometimes snide, but he smiled, too. And laughed and had himself one hell of a lot of fun. Which was more than Bo could imagine doing if he kept worrying about what it felt like to lose someone, quick as a strike of lightning. So he shut down his brains in deference to driving a ghost car through the streets of Hazzard, lying in the driver's seat while Luke shouted faulty instructions from where he was lying on the back seat, peering through a scope constructed out of odds, ends and utter faith that it would work. And he silently thanked his maker that not only had he not been taken today, as the whole town thought, but that Luke was still here, too. Beside him, or close enough anyway, making him feel brave enough to laugh at death, with whom he'd made acquaintance long ago and hoped not to see again for another eighty years or so.

* * *

><p>"Go right." It was a perfectly reasonable, logical suggestion and it got totally ignored. "Right," came out a little more insistently.<p>

"I know what I'm doing," Bo responded with a smile, as if this was the time or place for unrestrained glee.

The boy knew what he was doing all right. Making sure that when old Stump Percival made his move to pass, it'd be Luke's side of the car that he smashed into. There really ought to be a rule against men who'd already lost body parts in just this sort of race signing up again, but greed was greed and an entry fee was all it took to find yourself behind the wheel of a stock car, whether you had one hand or two. It was just that old Stump hadn't been much of a driver before that accident in nineteen seventy-five had taken away a goodly chunk of his left arm.

"Bo," he groused, looking over his shoulder to watch the weaving of Stump's car and spare a thought to whether it was an attempt to wiggle out a space for himself amongst the frost-runners, or plain old dangerous driving. "Don't," and then he made the mistake of turning to face front again. There was a sea of Dodges, Chryslers and Fords, and Bo was trying to thread a needle that didn't have an eye.

Nothing good had ever happened to them in Cedar City.

"I know what I'm doing," Bo insisted, a little more testily this time.

"I believe you," Luke answered with all the sincerity he could muster. "But do they know what you're doing?"

It was a rough field of wild drivers. Cooter was in the thick of it with them, taking up space and generally making it impossible for Bo to maneuver around Davey Hennessy, who was hogging the road and threatening to bang doors with one of the Johnson boys from down in Robertson's Corners. And that was just this little stretch of Main Street.

Derbies could get a man killed and that was a fact, an undeniable fact (and you didn't have to look further than old Stump to find evidence that they were at least dangerous), but it was a fact of which Bo was blissfully unaware. Because he didn't bother to notice that Cooter was trying to nudge him into Davey, that the Johnson boy's car was dinged from previous derbies and drifted left whenever its driver got distracted and forgot to hold it steady, or that old Stump back there was just a straight up menace to the road. Nope, Bo didn't reckon that either he or the General were mortal, so he just pushed his way to the front of all those crazy drivers without realizing just how close he had come to turning the whole bunch of them into monstrous ball of mangled tinfoil.

Luke had found his first gray hair the morning after Bo's last turn behind the wheel for a derby. He'd pulled it out and thrown it away like that would solve the problem, but now he could see the reality of the situation. He'd be as gray as Jesse or as bald as Boss if he kept riding shotgun when Bo drove derbies.

"See," the grinning idiot said, turning his head to face Luke when he really ought to be looking at the road in front of them. "I told you I knew what I was doing."

It was Rosco's fault. And Cedar City's, too, because nothing good had ever happened to the Dukes here. But more Rosco's, because he'd been chasing the Duke boys (and Luke had been running for no reason other than it was full daylight and if the sheriff actually managed to pull them over to the side of the road and their friends and neighbors witnessed the indignity of them sitting there with a cruiser putting on a spectacular light show behind them, well, they never would have lived it down) up Old King's Highway, and they'd had no choice but to swing off onto a series of old dirt roads to lose him. So it was Rosco's fault that they'd stumbled onto that decrepit racing oval and Cale Yarborough doing laps there.

His cousin had been a silly mess of nerves from the moment they'd realized who that solid, square-built, blonde man was that stood in front of them. All elbows and knees, voice too loud, words burbling out like Bo was a gangly teen all over again. Whatever thoughts might have been in that blonde brain of his got scattered to the wind by his rapt fascination of the man in front of them. It was love at first sight, and if Jill Dodson was even a glimmer of a memory in Bo's mind, she'd be reeling with jealousy over how fast and hard Bo fell for Cale Yarborough.

Luke could see the attraction, he could. The man had won himself enough trophies on the NASCAR circuit to merit their admiration and respect. But it was one thing to get all dreamy-eyed over the man, to sputter out words of admiration.

It was another thing entirely to talk your way into his car, which they had just been informed, was outfitted with the latest in technology, a humdinger of a turbocharger. And that fine piece of negotiation had been Luke's mistake, his contribution to this thing that was all Rosco's fault (and, of course, Cedar City never had been good to the Duke boys).

"Watch him, Bo!"

Because seeing Bo drive had turned everything around and upside down on its head, and Cale Yarborough had become enamored of _them_. Of Bo, mostly, because somewhere in the process of helping the visiting NASCAR driver fix his malfunctioning turbocharger and getting him out of town before the greed of Boss Hogg found a way to keep him there forever like the main attraction in a zoo (_over in this cage we have a NASCAR driver – don't get too close, he's not tame; none of those boys have ever been tame since the time the sport was invented)_ the General had gotten jumped over the Styx River. Again.

"You folks do this often?" Cale had asked when they landed safely in the sand on the far side, and it was all over, right then and there.

"Oh, you know how it is when you get a country boy behind the wheel," Luke had played it down, but it was too late. Cale had seen Bo drive, Bo had seen that seeing, and by the time the day was up, Bo pretty much figured there wasn't another driver in the world that could touch him. (It hadn't helped that Cale had offered to adopt the Duke boys.)

"He ain't nothing to worry about," was Bo shrugging him off. Nothing to concern yourself with here, folks, because even if the Johnson boy's frame is probably bent and he can't be counted on to keep the car going the direction he wants it to, even if Stump Percival weaves at slow speeds and zig-zags at high ones, and even if one is to the left of you and the other to the right with a one-lane bridge ahead, this here is Bo Duke behind the wheel. Nothing bad can happen.

The boy had been bitten by the NASCAR bug long ago, when Luke first explained to him that sometimes it was legal for cars to go fast. If you were in the right place and time, you could put your foot down on the pedal as hard as you wanted to, and no one could do a dang thing about it. Boy must've been all of thirteen at the time, already driving the pickup around the farm and disregarding all of Luke's instructions. The thought of a whole organization dedicated to the notion that the brake was a useless piece of equipment had fascinated the boy from day one, and even if that image was a gross misinterpretation of NASCAR and Bo was old enough to know better by now, his love of the idea hadn't faded.

Moonshine running was a fine substitute, at least when the boy was younger. A chance to race through the gauzy shadows, across the wilds of Hazzard. To go fast then faster, but there were considerations. Like the houses that dotted the roads, filled with innocents who weren't part of the chase, like deer that ambled across the blacktop, like long-haul truckers making the mistake of getting off the interstate to cross the mountains on back roads. Those reasons and a bunch more that Bo couldn't ever turn himself completely loose on a moonshine run.

Last month's little stint with Augie Detweiler had only added fuel to a brightly burning flame. Stunt driving wasn't NASCAR, but there were still stands. Devoid of spectators whenever the Duke boys were there, but Bo's eyes had lit up at the sight of them. Moonshine running lacked for fans, for men standing up to whoop and holler at the leader, for kids with hands over their ears against the roar of stock car engines, but faces stretched into broad smiles. And moonshine running definitely lacked for girls, sunburned shoulders sticking out from their halter tops, hair blowing into their eyes and bodies jiggling as they jumped up and down in excitement over the dashing, daring man behind the wheel.

"Damn it, Bo," Luke complained, but it was all under his breath. An afterthought, because by the time the words came out the danger had passed. Or they'd passed the danger, more like. It was still there lurking behind them in the fast-moving cars of their friends, neighbors and fellow contenders in the Cedar City Derby. One-lane bridges had a way of narrowing the field, and Bo had come out victorious this time.

The boy, and they never talked about it in some sort of tacit agreement not to jinx Bo's dreams, would do anything to get to NASCAR. He'd wooed Cale Yarborough, but that wasn't enough to get them any closer than watching a race from the pit. He'd outrun a slammer car in Augie Detweiler's stunt show, but that didn't get him more than the grudging admiration of a thug named Shoulders.

"Relax, cousin. I got it under control."

Whether he did or didn't was immaterial at this point. Bo was going to do whatever it took to win. This race (though nothing good had ever happened to the Duke boys in Cedar City), the next and the one after that, because somewhere or other the right one would come along. The time that a NASCAR scout just happened to come down to little old Hazzard in search of the next big star, or the newspaper clipping that would make it into the right hands. There wasn't anything Luke could do about it.

"Watch that turn, Bo!" Except try to make sure that they both stayed alive long enough for Bo's dreams to come true.


	8. Arrest Jesse, the Runaway

_**Author's Note:** Well, my chapter titles continue to get sillier, so I feel compelled to post the reminder that they are really there to keep you in tune with which episode(s) I am paralleling at any given time. Which I tell you now so that you won't get to wondering why Jesse never runs away..._

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter Eight - Arrest Jesse, the Runaway<br>**

"He's a crazy one."

Had he really let Bo go with as little as that? There were excuses, maybe. Thin ones, just about transparent, but he could make them if he wanted to.

They could cover more ground if they split up. Bo had offered to go off on his own. The scrawny farm kid had grown up to over six feet with broad shoulders and work-strengthened muscles; he could take care of himself. Bo knew the land better than any stranger to these parts ever would. He had that blonde charm and with any luck he wouldn't come up against a .38.

That was Luke's story in a nutshell, and it wasn't good enough, by miles, to pass the Jesse Duke test. Not that it would get that far, because it had already failed the Luke Duke test and here he was with a head full of regrets and no sign of Bo.

Girls. That was where it all fell apart. Girls.

That was where everything always fell apart, and Luke should have known better. Two would never be enough for Bo – twins, dropping out of the heavens to appear on Hazzard's roadways, just cruising up Route Thirty-six in a semi – and they were only a way-station, a moment of kissing between here and there. Bo needed multiples of girls, two becoming four before he'd get the half of what he wanted.

Four girls, pretty enough, but not a one of them worthy of the time Bo took to drool at them. Running the Dixie Auto Supply store and he really should have put it together sooner, before Jesse got arrested for a crime he would never think to commit, before the General had been stripped down to his bare bones, before Daisy had nearly driven them over a cliff in pursuit of the pretty little fillies that had been stripping cars then selling their parts to Cooter so he could put them right back into those very same cars, before Bo had gone off on his own. Looking for girls.

Bo had been a smart enough kid, once. Still blonde, still gullible and plenty lazy, but he'd had the basic ability to think and reason. And then a case of the stupids had broken out like the pimples across his cheeks. His legs had lengthened, his hair had curled, his voice had begun to deepen, and his brains had gone on hiatus. From then on, everything was girls. With Bo, standing in the midst of them all but shouting that he was ready to be led astray. He'd follow a girl anywhere she led, so long as it meant trouble, danger or risk.

"This is just a little strange," Bo had said, not two hours back when they were on the run in Cooter's pickup with those very same girls on their back door, wielding weapons. "I ain't never had no girl shooting at me before."

And back then, when his only worry had been that maybe one of those bullets whizzing through the air might actually come within reasonable range of actually hitting the borrowed pickup, Luke had taken the time to be witty. "Generally it's the girl's father that's shooting at you."

Not that it mattered much to Bo which way it went, the young ladies doing the shooting or their daddies – if there were girls to get closer to, that little magnet inside his cousin would draw him to them regardless of the artillery.

And Luke knew that, had been fully aware of that little fact for close to a decade now. The sun rose in the east and Bo liked girls a mite more than he liked having all his teeth and a body that was free of wonton bullet holes. But Luke had let him go, had accepted the flimsy, fragile reasoning that they would have a better chance of fixing the problem of Jesse's incarceration by going off in opposite directions.

Because Luke was his own brand of fool, and he might just as well admit that to himself right now. He'd been so enamored of that little picture in his mind (what if we made the General into a four-wheeler?) that if the suggestion had been made that Bo just go right on back to the edge of the cliff they'd just walked away from and then jump off, Luke might just have nodded and told him to watch that first step, it was a doozy.

But now that he had his own wish fulfilled, and the dust of the bluffs was flying around him as he bumped through parts Hazzard's wastelands, over roots and through streams that the General would never have been able to forge before, he could recognize that he was a fool.

"I'm just so worried about Bo," Daisy chirped in his ear, and that made it worse. Because now he had to comfort her when he hadn't even begun to figure out how to comfort himself.

"Ah, he's a Duke, he's got at least twelve lives," worked well enough, sounded like utter confidence in his own ears. Daisy was convinced (or at least she was convinced not to express her fears to Luke anymore) and actually set to watching for dust to be kicked up by the jeeps that the thieving girls had been spotted driving.

It was enough, directing traffic and giving orders to the other searchers, to distract him. To keep his mind from berating him on endless repeat for mistakes made and consequences yet to be paid. Until, that was, he saw them. All three of the jeeps belonging to the car-stripping girls, and up front, in the red one, Bo. Tied to the roll bar, his arms spread eagle and the charming little lady behind the wheel was driving like she didn't have a six-and-a-half foot human protuberance hanging out of the open top of her vehicle.

He'd been so cocky, such an idiot, getting the General all hiked up like this, driving him out of the garage with glee and shouting, "You can relax, the Marines have landed." Then he'd wasted time dickering with Boss and now he was anything but relaxed and his Marine training was useless against a bunch of girls that had fulfilled Bo's fondest dream and kidnapped him. Of course, Bo usually woke up a sweaty mess before he got to the part where the girls tried to behead him by driving through trees with low-hanging branches.

Wasn't much of an effort to overtake the jeep at the back of the pack; the girl behind the wheel wasn't half the driver she needed to be to handle the thing anyway. But that was just the green jeep, and it didn't matter, because Bo was in the red jeep, and somewhere in between the two there was a yellow jeep.

No one could get hurt, it was the cardinal rule that followed them over peaks and into down into valleys when they delivered moonshine, that chased them when they ran from Rosco. And it applied here, even if it was half anger that made him turn the steering wheel over to Daisy as he grabbed his compound bow, leaned out the window, nocked an arrow and pulled the sting as taut as it had ever been before letting loose. Couldn't hurt anyone, but they could take out a tire here and there and as long as the jeep stayed upright and no one fell out, Luke was approximately playing by the rules.

Even if he halfway did want to hit the girls and his uncle had forbid him from ever doing any such thing before he had even reached school age.

The yellow jeep fell to the wayside, and he was nocking his next arrow when Daisy steered them into a bump. Lost the bow to the dirt of the road beneath them, and that was probably divine intervention, because there Bo was, not a hundred yards in front of them, still on his feet in the back seat of the jeep, hands tied tight and no place to go if the jeep rolled.

Seconds to minutes, and Luke was as helpless as he had ever been. Nothing to do but berate himself for being an idiot, for knowing Bo's luck with women and letting him go running out after them alone anyway. And then, finally, his cousin went and showed that he could, in fact, be trusted to look after himself. A shift of hips and Bo's fingertips were digging into that little pouch on his belt, and producing a knife. If there was one thing Bo always had been, it was deft of hand, and he made short work of cutting through one rope, then the other, even as the jeep continued hurtling forward as fast as its driver could make it go. Free, his cousin was finally free, finally sitting back down out of the deadly dangerous position he'd been in.

And that was where it all went crazily awry all over again. Because instead of getting away from the girl, Bo went toward her. Arms around her and—

"The cliff," Daisy was shouting.

No time to waste thinking or deciding anything at all, Luke just pulled even with the jeep and hollered a few words of his own about cliffs ahead and bailing out.

Bo, to his credit, listened. He rolled right out of that fast-moving jeep.

And brought the girl with him. Luke could have justified that with the niggling notion that no one was allowed to get hurt, and it might have held a small kernel of truth. But that bigger kernel was still there, undeniable in its accuracy: Bo Duke's brain went into remission whenever he got within smelling distance of a girl.

* * *

><p>"Bo."<p>

Luke hadn't trusted him for awhile, he knew that. Could feel the tension of it in the vinyl of the bench seat between them. And maybe he had his reasons. Or reason, there was only one that Bo could think of. All right, sure, it was a big one, one that ended in a fireball at the bottom of Kissing Cliff, but it was still only one reason. When Bo had already proved himself reliable and honorable a hundred times over before they even got close to the edge.

"It ain't nothing, Luke."

Thing was, a 'shine delivery was not a real good time for all that lack of trust to go asserting itself.

"It's something," the answer came back, followed by Luke twisting in his seat to get a good look out Sweet Tilly's back window.

But then Luke always had expected the worst. Out of most things, not necessarily out of Bo.

"It ain't nothing to worry about," Bo corrected, but he was starting to have his doubts. Luke (and only Luke) could do that to him.

"It's moving," came his cousin's assertion. "As fast as we are. It's something."

"Maybe it's a shadow."

It was dark, black on black with no real shades of gray. Absent moon, stars veiled behind clouds. Nothing to see inside the car or out, but he knew that Luke's lips went flat at those last words, that those eyes, so blue they ought to be visible even in the gloom that surrounded them, were squinted down. Announcing, with just that, how little he appreciated that particular bit of wisdom.

"You reckon you can keep her on the road?" And see, that right there. Luke had never asked him that (okay, he'd asked him that a number of times with sarcasm just dripping off his tongue, but he had never, in all seriousness, asked Bo that kind of question) over all their years of driving together, and now—"if we take her down to the old Ridge Road?" One failure, and it wasn't even his, but Luke was going to harp on it. "There ain't no _shadow_," ah, now there was the missing sarcasm, found all over again, "that would follow us down there."

"It wasn't me, it was the accelerator," came snapping out of him like it had a dozen times before. "I'm good, Luke, but even I can't get a car stopped if the accelerator gets stuck."

"The accelerator working now?"

"Yeah."

"Then step on it."

_Yes, sir._

Luke pulled himself up onto his knees then, fully turned around and watching out the back window, looking for trouble that just wasn't there. "Besides," came mumbling out of his mouth, like it was supposed to be under his breath. "It was your turn to tune her car anyways. And check her accelerator, but you was too busy doing a little _body work_," but it was plenty loud enough for Bo to hear, and Luke knew it. He just wanted the right to look innocent when Bo got pushed far enough to start hollering at him. "With Lorianne Barlow."

And anyway, Luke could go on all day about how Bo ought to have done a safety inspection on Daisy's car before they found themselves on the run from Rosco and Enos, their female cousin's Roadrunner bumping over divots and kicking up dust as they tore down the hillside toward the cliff. Both of them in this car knew that Luke liked to tinker and Bo liked to drive, and there'd never been anything like a schedule when it came to who looked after the cars in the family. Luke did it and he didn't complain about it until something went wrong on one of them, and then, suddenly, there'd be all those cross words about how it had been Bo's turn to fix it.

"It ain't no shadow," Luke announced. "It's Buchanan. Hit it Bo!"

And just like that, all of Luke's concerns about whether Bo could hold to the road disappeared. He started giving quick orders, the sort that would have been wild to anyone else's ears, but Bo understood them well enough. Out toward the swamp where they'd lost many a revenue agent before, and even if this one was a little more experienced, a little more dogged than any they'd faced in a few years, he'd be a fool to chase the Dukes that far.

Hazzard went through revenuers in the same fashion that it went through seasons – some burned out under the hot sun, others disappeared in a spring storm of fury, some just fell to the side like leaves out of trees while others froze up. Bo took a certain pride in the way they got driven to desk jobs or retirement after only a short stay in this region. He figured he had a pretty strong hand in their career decisions.

"Left, left," Luke was hollering, trying to send them over the high road, but Bo had other ideas. Yeah, there were thicker trees up above, but down here there were murky shadows that he could hide in. "Dang it, Bo!"

And there it was again. Luke didn't trust him. And he'd like to blame it on the demise of Daisy's car. (Heck, he'd like to blame it on Daisy herself, who had been the one most interested in seeing that Susie Holmes girl married to her farmer boyfriend, Fred. The Duke boys wouldn't even have been in her car at all if Luke hadn't gotten the brilliant idea to switch cars so Daisy could decoy Rosco over to the far ends of the county while they took off in the opposite direction. But it wasn't Daisy's fault that she believed in love, even over family objections, and Bo reckoned that if he couldn't have the girl himself, Fred looked like a nice enough guy for her to be with. Love was a good thing, even if Luke couldn't quite get himself to believe it was after that red-headed racecar driver broke his heart.) But it wasn't about any of that, and it didn't have to do with his driving, exactly. Luke trusted the way he handled a car, he just didn't like the way Bo used his brain. And that was too damned bad.

Because Bo had himself a plan that was going to work, down here where he had the advantage of a lifetime spent in Hazzard. And if his tongue burned with the urge to tell Luke so, he bit it back in deference to the need to concentrate on his surroundings.

Buchanan was Luke's kind of guy – too smart for his own good – and Bo figured that under different circumstances the two ought to hit it off perfectly. An overconfident fool, the sort of revenuer that would run just as dark as his quarry, no headlights, taillights or reflectors of any kind, and that gave Bo his second advantage. Skirting through the dust of roads he knew like he knew his own family, like Luke should know him. Should know full well that Bo had that third advantage up his sleeve, but somehow he didn't.

"Bo." He was agitated, too busy shuffling around in the passenger seat, probably hiding behind his own arm. "Watch the—" offering useless advice when Bo knew precisely what he was doing, driving them through the wash where the Hazzard dam had breached back in nineteen sixty-eight, where there was a gully that was still littered with boulders. "—Rocks," and yeah, Luke was too busy trying to protect his head, as though there was any danger at all that he'd lose it.

When there wasn't, because whether there was a load of moonshine in his trunk or a racing number on his door, Bo Duke was the best driver in three counties, and probably three states. Better than anyone who'd ever passed through Hazzard's borders, and that included his own kin.

"It's fine, Luke," he consoled, because his cousin always did expect the worst, and that was enough of an affliction to live with, he supposed.

"Bo!" started up again in the passenger seat, but got cut off by the way the car swerved, at the last possible second, to miss that two-ton iron boulder that sat in the middle of the field in front of them. And if Luke had more to say after that, it got lost under the sound of steel wrapping itself around stone. "Whoa," his cousin wound up saying instead of whatever groused complaints he intended to come out with. Genuine awe, and that was just music to Bo's ears. "Hold up a second," followed and there was no sign of that tight crouch his cousin's body had been in a few seconds back, not now that he was stretched out over the back to the seat, looking to see whether the hissing and ticking heap of a car contained a live revenuer or a—"He's okay; hit it, cuz!"

And all was right with Luke again. Except, of course, for the fact that they both knew that he didn't trust Bo.


	9. Rainy Day Treasure, Daisy in Pursuit

_**Author's Note:** Dumbest chapter title yet. I'll depart from canon soon, though, so at least it probably won't get any worse. And in creating this one, I realized I had misnamed the last one. It's been fixed now._

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter Nine - Rainy Day Treasure, Officer Daisy in Pursuit, Hey Jude<strong>

Bo's hair was flat. It was a tragedy, really, one that certainly merited the monumental amounts of pouting, huffing and blowing that his cousin was doing over there. All that pretty blonde fluff just hanging down into his eyes, and the boy was utterly put out. And that was before Daisy, who really ought to have known better, had the gall to stick out a hand and ruffle those low-hanging bangs.

She couldn't be blamed, really. The fall of hair across his forehead made Bo look like the little boy he'd been not so long ago, and no one could resist that. Besides, as far as Luke saw it, Daisy provided the near-perfect distraction.

Carrots and beans were easy, cucumbers presented something of a challenge, but onions, those were the real prize. Day after day of relentless rain, the sort that turned the roads of Hazzard into sucking mud and the farmyard into a swamp, and they'd been pinned to the indoors too long.

Daisy was trying to help. Sure, her methods lacked skill or subtlety, but her intentions were good. Playing with Bo's hair when the guy was already miserable about it was a pretty decent diversion – cucumber-worthy, when it came down to it. It was going to take a suddenly-appearing tornado (or, more likely an appealing girl) to create an onion-worthy distraction.

Cutting vegetables. Technically, that was what the Duke boys had been reduced to. Sitting at the old table while the world trickled and dripped around them, waiting for a brighter day, or for the old roof to give in to the sogginess and come crumbling down around them. By now they might have been rooting for the latter, because rebuilding would give them something to do after days of nothing.

Each of the boys had a pile of vegetables in front of him, while Daisy flitted around from stove to refrigerator, stopping to check on their progress. Luke's uncut pile was looking fine, fully three-quarters smaller than it had been when they started, while Bo's looked pretty close to how it always had. Frown about that crossing his female cousin's face, but Bo didn't see it and Luke ignored it, so it didn't matter. The pile of cut vegetables in the middle of the table was getting consistently bigger, and she ought to be happy enough about that.

"Have y'all figured out who you're going to take to the dance on Friday?" Now that was a fine distraction right there. Bo's eyes lost focus and his lips took on that silly smile as his brain turned itself off. Pretty pictures of young ladies in high-riding skirts and low-necked blouses flashing through his head, and Luke took the opportunity to roll an uncut onion from his pile onto Bo's.

Another frown from Daisy about that; he'd finally been caught. Sort of, it was just his girl cousin. He put a finger to his lips which only made her glower all the more, but she shut her mouth, which had been getting ready to say something that would likely put an end to his fun, with a solid click of her teeth. And kept giving him the stink-eye. Just, _Luke __Duke_, the hard look on her face announced, _when __he __figures __it__ out, __I__'__m __gonna __take__ his __side_.

"Holly Mae," Bo finally came out with, proving that unless Daisy helped him out, he'd never work out that Luke had been slowly unloading the uncut vegetables on his side of the table into the pile on Bo's side. Carrots and beans first, but they were too easy, hadn't presented enough of a challenge to be worth it. Now Bo had two more cucumbers and one more onion than he'd started with. And between the vegetables he'd gifted to Bo and the ones he'd actually cut, Luke was going to be done with his part of this little chore soon.

"Granny Annie will pull out all your fingernails if you try it." And his fingers to follow, just so Bo couldn't touch her curvaceous, blonde granddaughter, no matter how shameless the girl was in just about begging him to. Because she wasn't ripe enough for the picking, Granny had said, and she'd meant it.

"We saved her," Bo reminded him.

"Don't matter," he answered back, because it didn't. One of the strangest days of their lives, on the run with counterfeit money, and Rosco had caught them. Not a drop of moonshine in the car, just bill after bill of still wet and somewhat smudged greenbacks, but it hadn't mattered worth a pitcher of spit that the fake bills weren't theirs. The Hazzard law had been the laughing stock of the tri-county region for a while, and Luke figured that the Duke family's continued delivery of moonshine to customers high and low had a little something to do with that. Catching them doing anything at all that might put them away for a couple of years had to be Rosco's fondest dream.

But it was all in the name of a good cause. Old Granny was in love with her art, which included paintings of the mountains and the countryside, and then there was old Abe Lincoln, surrounded by a series of fives and the words _legal __tender_. That love was just a touch passionate, a little too fervent for her own, or the Dukes', good. So they'd risked life and limb to save her from herself. But memories were conveniently faulty things, and Granny Annie would do a bucketful of forgetting if Bo showed up on her doorstep armed with some flowers and his brightest smile, asking to take Holly Mae to the Boar's Nest for the annual mid-winter Snowflake Ball (where no one wore a gown or a suit, and everyone danced disco instead of formal ball dancing). Out would come the pellet gun, the sweet old granny firing it the same as most fathers in the region would, aiming at Bo's feet until he danced himself right out of her yard.

"She ain't never gonna let you get near Holly Mae."

"Fine," Bo snapped at him, like it was his fault that Jesse's old friend would be protecting her young kin until poor Holly Mae was a senior citizen herself. "Who are you going to take?"

The cucumber in front of him, he found, suddenly needed to be cut. Carefully and with his full attention, because vegetables could be wily things.

Her name had been Laura, and she'd had that willowy look to her. Not skinny, not linebacker wide, just tall and capable. She could have been a Hazzard girl, hatched and grown up on the Porter farm, because she resembled that clan. But she wasn't.

She was a professor, an academic. The kind who read history out of proper books because she didn't have an uncle to ramble on about it, because she didn't have to work a farm or make liquor. She was smart, sure, but she was also sheltered. And he was a fool to have wanted her.

He knew that. He hadn't even kissed her because he couldn't quite picture it: moonshining Luke Duke, his hair slicked down with water, standing stiff in a three-piece suit, wide fingers struggling to hold onto a tiny wine glass, lips sipping delicately, offering his right hand to shake as his professor girlfriend introduced him to her colleagues at a cocktail party, biting his tongue so he could keep his promise to her about not saying _ain__'__t_. Or double-damn, or any of the other words that would mark him as a hick, a rube, a plowboy. A farmer, and that's what he was. He'd never seen fit to be ashamed of it before and he didn't want to start now, which was why he couldn't have Laura. But he'd wanted her.

The flip side mental image wasn't any prettier. Laura trying to handle the basic necessities of survival in Hazzard when she didn't even know enough not to stand up in a boat that was surrounded by ravenous alligators.

He couldn't have her, and that was why he'd said goodbye without even thought of suggesting they see each other again. And the skies, mourning for something that had never existed, had opened up within hours of her departure, and hadn't seen fit to stop crying yet. Which left him and Bo with nothing to do but help Daisy with supper. Sort of. He had to admit that they hadn't been as attentive to the task as their female cousin would have liked.

"Nobody," he answered, which was only the truth. "Don't see no reason to go at all." And that part might or might not have been entirely honest. Because someone always made a fool of themselves, and someone else always riled Rosco to the point of ijits and wijits, and if nothing else, there was always the fifty-cent beer.

"What?" But saying it was enough to get Daisy wound up. "Luke Duke, I been on the planning committee for a month. A whole month I've spent in meetings figuring out what the theme was going to be and how to decorate and…" He stopped listening then. Because he knew how the lecture went and he knew she'd loved every minute of figuring this dance out, and if he didn't show (which he was going to, and all of them in this room knew it) she would still be at the center of it all, wide smile across her face. Besides, it was more important to take advantage of her pink-faced, arms-flailing distraction. An onion, over to Bo's pile.

But that had become easy now and it wasn't much of an accomplishment to do the same thing you'd already done. To make this interesting, he had to up the ante. A cucumber and an onion, now that would be worth it. So he started the transfer process, rolling, nudging.

"Luke Duke, are you listening to me?" And that put an end to it right there, Daisy's wild eyes focusing on him and Bo's following, caught somewhere between amusement and horror, because Luke had really done it this time and she wasn't just annoyed, she was mad. And a mad Daisy was a dangerous thing. Then again, a mad Bo Duke wasn't anything to sneeze at.

Reading _Tom Sawyer_ never did make the boy any smarter and all these years of spending time with Luke at his side hadn't ever taken away the shocked look he always got when he realized he'd been had.

"Luke!" he complained, wide eyes staring at his own pile of uncut vegetables before looking over at Luke's. Trying to do the impossible math of how many he'd started with and what he had now, and he was just – shocked. Amazed, put out, downright angry. Eyebrows like caterpillars, angling in the middle as if they were planning to crawl down his nose.

Luke could, he supposed, have been a hundred miles from here, up in Durham, North Carolina with Laura. In a big and bright house with fine furniture, spotless because there would be no muddy farmyard and no livestock to tend to, so there'd be no reason to track anything unwanted into the house. And if, somehow, he or his professor girlfriend managed to make a mess anyway, there'd be the hired help to clean it up.

So utterly unlike what was happening right now: Bo, shoving the whole pile of vegetables in front of him towards Luke without halfway paying attention to the fact that carrots were getting away from him and falling to the floor, oblivious to the fact that Daisy was threatening to smack their heads together if they made a mess of her kitchen, and somewhere in the living room Jesse was glaring at them over his newspaper and silently praying for the sun to show up again real soon.

Yeah, he could be with Laura in some fancy place, doing fancy things. He'd reckoned he was happier to be right here.

* * *

><p>A huff, a quick turn of a head, blonde hair caught in the glow of headlights from behind. Another huff and finally, "Luke!" A complaint.<p>

In answer, a shrug. "Lose her."

"She ain't supposed to be chasing us in the first place," elicited a laugh in response.

"Ain't nothing in that manual of hers says she ain't." And Luke ought to know. He'd helped her study the dang thing from cover to cover, had quizzed her on her knowledge until she'd told him to knock it off. Daisy knew all the laws in Hazzard.

And was a sworn officer now, a deputy every bit as much as Enos was. Or twice as much as Enos was, because Enos wasn't chasing them now. But Daisy was.

"She ought to be working," Bo groused.

"She _is_ working," Luke pointed out, but the truth didn't help much of anything. They had a load of moonshine in their trunk and a cousin, with a glowing roof rack over her head and a revolver on her hip, chasing them down.

"At the Boar's Nest," Bo clarified. "Where she'd be safe." Strutting around in tiny shorts while long-haul truckers who didn't know any better made grabs at her—yeah, she'd always been so _safe _at the Boar's Nest. A lot safer than she was skimming over deer paths that she knew just as well as her quarry did, at speeds that only a Duke would dare.

The whole thing was, Luke would have to admit, his fault. He'd gotten Daisy fired from one job and then helped her get hired at the other one. But he really would have figured that Jesse would have put a stop to it somewhere before the swearing-in could happen.

But, "What's so all-fired wrong with a Duke becoming a peace officer?" had been their uncle's contribution to this crazy little scenario that they had going now. "Us Dukes was not raised to be against law and order."

No, just to trick, tease, fool, bamboozle and otherwise escape those who wanted to enforce it. Which was awfully hard to do when the law pursuing you was your own cousin, who knew too well all the schemes you'd pulled in the past.

"Well, she ain't, she's just about in our back seat with us," Luke said, turning his head to squint into the glare of the light show behind them. "You're just going to have to lose her."

"Lose her," Bo complained. "How am I supposed to lose her when we taught her to drive?"

"I don't remember you doing a lot of the teaching," might not have been the smartest thing Luke could have said under the circumstances. "Considering you was still on bike wheels at the time," he finished, then threw his arm across his eyes. Low-hanging branches and Bo was cruising awfully close to Luke's side of the path.

"All right. You taught her. Ain't you the clever one," Bo answered back. "Now you figure our way out of this."

(Jesse, in the late-night meeting that had become almost habit between them and usually featured discussions of Luke's pitifully turnip-sized heart but this time was about Daisy's aspirations towards law enforcement, had been equally as unimpressed. "If you can't outrun a deputy," he'd pointed out, "you shouldn't be running 'shine." And when Luke had reminded him that Daisy wouldn't be just any deputy, she'd be a Duke, Jesse had raised an appraising eyebrow. "You really figure that you and Bo together can't figure out how to outrun her?"

"Well yeah," He'd answered back. "But we ain't allowed to hurt her."

"Luke," the old man had lectured. "You ain't allowed to hurt no one. Now you been lucky. It's been a lot of years since this area had a really good revenuer. And you boys has gotten a little too used to that. You're lazy, and your driving skills is getting rusty. If Daisy catches you, it'll be your own fault."

Which hadn't been helpful in the least.)

"I shouldn't have to," he informed Bo. "I taught her, but I taught you more."

A snort, either refuting him or pointing out that it didn't matter who taught whom what when there was a cruiser sticking to their back bumper like it had been glued there.

"Besides," Luke added on, mentally ticking over what kind of tricks he could use to get Daisy to back off, but she knew to hold a car steady no matter what manner of fireworks got tossed at her grille. "It ain't me that wanted her to become a deputy. You got to blame Enos for that." They didn't have any nails, and he didn't suppose he ought to go firing arrows at his girl cousin's tires. Not, that was, unless he wanted to find a snake in his bed (and it wasn't that he minded snakes, but they belonged out in the woods, not being hunted up by Daisy's revenge-seeking fingers and placed between his otherwise soft and welcoming sheets). "He's the one told her about the job."

"Yeah, well," Bo answered back, swerving the car a hard right to take it down a different trail, one that led to the swamp. But there wasn't any point in that; the girl knew her way around down there as well as either of them. "Enos ain't here. I'm blaming you."

Things sometimes had a way of coming into focus. Like windshield wipers across fogged glass, and suddenly everything was crystal clear. Like it had just been waiting there, just beyond where he could see, just needing him to clear away the condensation.

"That's it," he announced with a snap of his fingers. "I got it." Somehow, Bo didn't look terribly excited by this news. Maybe it was that whole notion that Luke's ideas got Bo into trouble burbling through his thoughts again. Funny how Bo could forget that Luke's ideas got them out of trouble just as often. "Go back towards Route Thirty-six."

"Luke—" was the start of a complaint, a very rational and sensible complaint, he was sure. About how close they were to what had always been safety before, hiding in the swamp, and how insane it would be to go out on the blacktop, and not just any blacktop, either. Where Luke wanted him to go was civilization, dang it, and what was he thinking?

"Just do it." There had been occasions when taking the time to listen to Bo's complaints had been worthwhile; this wasn't one of them. "Now." He'd learned, somewhere back in his Marine days, to give orders quietly. It was a lot harder to argue with a man that wasn't yelling at you.

Bo did as he was told, his lowered eyebrows silently cursing Luke for a fool, and Daisy obediently followed behind, zigging to every one of Bo's zags, trying for all the world to get in front while her siren screamed loud enough to wake the dead.

"Go left on Elm," Luke commanded.

"Oh, fine. Make me go across town with her back there. That's a great idea, Luke."

"Then," he went on in his instructions, utterly ignoring the complaints. "Go around the square twice."

"What?" Bo was the exact opposite of amused. "Luke, Enos' boarding house ain't but two buildings over from the courthouse. And the second he hears the siren go by—"

"He'll start running for his cruiser. By the time you get around the second time, he might just be ready to join the chase. If he ain't, you got to go around a third time."

"What?" Bo said again, and it was getting really annoying. Luke had been, he was certain, perfectly clear.

"Seems to me you keep bragging about how there ain't nobody in three states that can drive half as good as you," Luke reminded him, and just like that, Bo's temporary deafness cleared right up. He was even a good sport about the fact that Enos tripped because he was so busy fussing over strapping on his gun belt as he ran, and went around a fourth time, just to let him catch up.

Daisy, meanwhile, was getting too smart for her own good back there, pulling a one-eighty so she could go around the wrong way and try to cut them off, but Bo just took to the sidewalk to avoid her. Waited until both cruisers were lined up and ready for the chase, then, "Now what do I do?" he snapped.

"What comes naturally," Luke answered with a grin that he knew Bo wouldn't have appreciated even if he had been able to turn away from the road.

"Thanks a lot," he offered, but he put his foot down on the accelerator, and just like that his shoulders lost the tension they'd been holding as he entered that trance-like state that he always did when he became one with the car (or the road, or whatever it was that he melded with so seamlessly in ways that Luke had never quite understood).

Meanwhile, the headlights of two cruisers swerved behind them in some sort of unconscious ballet as Enos, a mass of tightly sprung chivalry, tried to take over the chase from Daisy.

Luke reached for the dashboard. "How about a little entertainment?" he asked, but Bo was too busy maintaining his transcendental state to answer.

"Now Daisy," came from the police band to which Luke had just turned the C.B.

"That's Officer Duke," was her curt correction.

"Yes, Ma'am." Enos was nothing if not unfailingly polite, even as he was back there trying to get in front of Daisy or at least next to her. "But I can take over now if you'd only let me get in front."

Which degenerated into static as the two argued, police style, over one way radios. It was music to his ears.

But they held somewhat steady for all their fancy moves, and somehow or other, did not cancel each other out.

"Bo," he said, like a bark, firm and commanding enough to wake his cousin up out of his communion with Sweet Tilly. "Jump something."

"Huh?" But he'd heard, that little curl at the corner of his lips went a long way toward proving that.

"Something small, Bo," or at least not the Styx River. Something manageable, something preferably wet at the bottom.

Bo's tongue came away from his teeth with a sucking sound of complaint at the restriction, but when he cranked the steering wheel it was to set a course to Cold Creek, which Luke figured was a perfectly good and logical choice.

Enos and Daisy back there had to give up their struggle for now – this path was one lane only, so Enos settled in behind their cousin; a perfect gentleman, letting the lady go first, even if he was also trying to save her the trouble of chasing after them at all.

Worked ideally for Luke's purposes anyway. Still watching out the back window when he felt the bump then lift that indicated they were airborne, saw how Daisy's headlights rose into the same arc behind them. Heard the splash when Enos got the angle all wrong, felt the whiplash as Bo pulled Tilly in a spin then to a stop to watch what came next.

Daisy instantly gave up the chase to turn back in an attempt to rescue Enos, who was using one dripping arm to wave her off, that high pitched voice of his squealing.

"How'd you know she was gonna do that?" Bo asked in response to the way Luke was grinning victory.

Well, that was easy. Daisy was the same kind of fool for love that Bo had always been, even if she wasn't quite willing to admit how she felt about the deputy. There were priorities in the world, and none of his kin could ever see them around the way they followed after their hearts.

"Hit it, Bo," Luke said instead of answering. "He ain't going to accept a lick of her help," up to his neck in water though he was, "until after she's done her sworn duty." Of catching them, that was, but she'd never have a chance because she was still arguing with Enos while they were already disappearing into the tree line.

* * *

><p>He was—the guy was big. Mean-looking and he hated Luke. Hate at first sight and it didn't get any better when Luke went and tossed a rattlesnake at him. A live one with beady eyes; Luke threw it with that fine arm that the high school coaches had always bragged so much about, made sure it landed right in their tormentor's car with him. Watched and laughed as this Patch Loring, who had never liked Luke and now had himself a mighty fine reason to be feeling that way, panicked and rolled his car.<p>

And, yes, okay. Luke had gathered up that rattler from where it had been carefully placed, on the floorboards of the General, right where Bo's feet normally took up residence. It had been a straightforward plan to save Bo from a painful and debilitating bite that had done it, as the two of them went about the process of pretending to prove themselves worthy of joining an outlaw's gang. Luke looking out for him because that was just the way it worked. Luke was older, used to be taller, was still somewhat stronger (couldn't drive as well even if he refused to admit that, most days), and it was a lifetime habit. Bo was threatened; Luke removed the threat.

He couldn't swear that that very simple sequence had ever reversed itself before. Sure, there'd been fights – in the Boar's Nest or out of it – and sometimes it took two Duke boys to handle one particularly burly combatant, but this wasn't that. It had been that, it had been a big old brawl of men with Luke on the bottom, but it had been a pretty even match all the same, until that Texas Ranger, Jude Emery, had tried to break it up.

And maybe this was what came of picking up strangers along the side of the road. Though this one had the cool assurance of John Wayne and spoke in the deep rumbling tones of Merle Haggard, so he couldn't be all bad, even when it turned out that he had a badge. He wasn't a revenuer, he was just a single-minded, somewhat misguided lawman, was all. He didn't know what the Dukes did for a living, and if he had, he might not have cared. What he wanted, with an almost amusing determination, was to wrap his handcuffs around the silliest-looking (and behaving) outlaw to ever pick Hazzard's outskirts to hide in: Snake Harmon.

Jude had taken a pretty instant shine to the Dukes (mostly Daisy, but he'd had some positive feeling left over for the men of the family, too) and trusted them to assist in this endeavor. He'd even, in a moment of generosity, suggested that they'd make decent lawmen, but they'd done their own turn as deputies and it had ended with them fighting over a girl that wasn't any good for either of them (and wasn't really a cop herself, so go figure).

"Naw, we're lucky enough just being Dukes," was how he evaded the suggestion, while Cooter just about suffocated on his own tongue that he was biting down on to keep from laughing at the notion of the moonshine-running Duke boys as Texas Rangers.

Luke was smarter than that, he'd just slung an arm over Bo's shoulder and added. "That's a fact."

But now his supposedly intelligent cousin had gone and riled a man that was just about twice his size. Had fought him and insulted him and if that wasn't enough, he had accepted the challenge to arm-wrestle him. Which could end one of two ways, really. Patch, who had apparently been charged with seeing to their demise, could rip Luke's arm right out of its socket. Or, if Snake Harmon's second in command was feeling generous, he could just mash Luke's wrist down into that cactus that would leave him with a permanently weeping wound.

"Luke," he called, because for a moment only, his cousin looked vulnerable. Like he was in trouble, but he couldn't be. It had to be an act to fool Snake, who had just told Patch to turn it on, to use his full strength against the Duke boy.

"Bo," came out as a grunt, like his cousin didn't have enough breath to say his name right. It was a trick, had to be. Not that he could see why Luke would be pretending to lose an arm-wrestling match, but he must have his reasons. Had to. He couldn't really be asking for Bo's help. Could he?

"Luke," he said louder, with more edge. _Snap __out__ of __it, __now. __Stop __the __charade __or __at __least __give __me __a __sign __that__ you__'__ve __got__ this __thing __under__ control._

There was that cactus, there was Luke's bare arm, mere fractions of an inch away from the spines. There was Patch's knowing smile and Jude's wince, and there was Luke's voice, a grumble in the sound of his name. It was enough that Bo's faith was shaken and he found himself in uncharted waters where it was him that was supposed to save Luke.

And then the moment was over, as Daisy crashed the party (in sort of a literal way) by driving Cooter's souped-up car right into the table that Luke and Patch's elbows had been resting on, making the men jump away while the cactus got pulverized.

He breathed then, hadn't realized when he'd stopped. Sudden inhalation and then it was giggles because he'd been fooled, just like all of Snake Harmon's gang had, into believing Luke was really in trouble. He'd been a fool, of course. Luke had never needed Bo's help a single day in his life.


	10. One Carnival Does Not Thrill All

_**Author's Note: **Happy Holidays! I've been trying to match up my updates to when some of these episodes have been airing on CMT. That'll stop here, for a couple of reasons, one of which is that I am headed out for the holidays and not sure how often I'll get to update until I am back on home turf. So enjoy the holidays y'all, and catch you on the flip side!  
><em>

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter Ten - One Carnival Does Not Thrill All<br>**

_Today:_

This, then, is what it's like when a man takes leave of his wits but not his senses. Because all five of the latter are crisp and clear as everything else goes fuzzy around the edges. The sight of the young woman's face as it softens, just slightly, at the recognition that she might just get what she wants; the sound of his kin as they utter their disbelief and disapproval. The dizzying smell of pyrotechnics, flames and fireworks that turn an interesting feat into one that is spectacular, mixed and mingled with sweat and perfume. The taste of bitterness on his tongue as he stands up for himself, the contradicting ache in his fingers to feel the smoothness of the freckled skin of her shoulders beneath his hands.

To hold her firm, to kiss her with all the strength and passion in his body until she has no choice but to recognize, to instinctively understand the dangers in mocking him or expressing doubts as to his abilities. To realize all that he is capable of, and to want to hold onto him with both hands.

The rest becomes dim, fading into the background as he imagines the things he wants her to be to him. He's been sleepwalking all his life, in full possession of his wits, but with dulled senses. This, finally, is the freshness of life, revealed to him.

* * *

><p>Nothing good had ever happened to them in Cedar City. Other than winning that Derby in the spring, but that had come at the price of Bo's ego getting swelled that much bigger, his stubbornness growing ever more prominent. What little listening he'd once done when it came to both reason and instructions had gotten eroded away from his hard little head.<p>

Worse things had happened to that Bob Dexter guy, who had tried that dare-devil stunt for the Carnival of Thrills. A change in the hum of his engine, a pop, a bang and fire as he crashed downward toward the hardpan of the Cedar City Fairgrounds. But Cedar City hadn't ever been good to the Duke boys and it wasn't about to start now, not when Bo's eyes were big as silver dollars and his jaw set hard against witnessing the disaster. And Luke's arms were full of a shaken Daisy, and he didn't have a free hand to grab hold of the good Samaritan that Bo wanted to be, so he left that to Jesse. Who could do it on the command in his voice alone.

The trip back to Hazzard after their little afternoon excursion (which Luke hadn't much wanted to go out to anyway, and it was him dawdling over the General's engine that had made them late) lacked for fun and laughter. It was that kind of quiet that settles over four people who are working through the realization that the impossible happened, that the stunt was real and not some safe sleight of hand, that it going wrong meant someone got whisked away in an ambulance. Well, three of them were working through it, anyway. Luke already knew things could go wrong and people could get hurt if enough risk got piled up like the thirty-two cars the poor guy had tried to jump over. But he reckoned that no one wanted to hear that he'd always known it could happen, like some five-year-old kid's _I told you so_, so he it kept to himself.

And by bedtime the images and thoughts had pretty much shaken themselves out of the family's heads anyway. Daisy had been humming over her sewing while Jesse read his Bible and Bo cheated at cards. Not that Luke could point out how he was doing it, just Bo knew a few tricks about shady dealing, and Luke kept losing, so there had to be some manner of cheating going on.

"Let me see your sleeve," he grumbled. Bo grinned and flipped his cuff up to show there were no shenanigans.

"I could take off my shirt," he offered. "If it would help." It wouldn't, it would just give Bo an excuse to puff out his chest in pride and show off the broadness of his shoulders.

"Just give me the deck," Luke countered. "I'm dealing." A little frown about that from Bo, a huff about his affronted pride or his insulted honor, and one hand was still working the buttons on his shirt.

"I reckon," Jesse interrupted, peering at them over the top of his Bible, just about chastising Bo for his striptease act, or maybe it was Luke for goading him to it, "it's time we all went to bed anyway." Which had put an end to the fight before it could get started, leaving Bo grinning over the fact that he had won the last round. Luke left him to it, because it was worth it to see a smile replace that gray cast that his face had taken over when the Leap for Life stunt had ended in a spectacularly ugly way. "Y'all got plenty of work to do tomorrow to make up for all the lollygagging you did today." Jesse words only made Bo that much happier, because Luke had done more than his fair share of the lollygagging, and in his cousin's brilliantly blonde logic, that meant Luke would do more than his fair share of the work tomorrow.

And the smile was still there in the next morning's crisp coolness, as Luke heaved the rails of the new fence they were about to construct along Old Mill Road, and Bo pounded the posts down into their holes. Some smug thought or other running through his brain when Cedar City followed them back to Hazzard. Bo was already drooling from the time he saw the rolling disaster kicking up dust as it pulled up to a stop in front of them; by the time they got up to the vehicle it was hard to tell whether that sheen on the boy's shirtless chest was the sweat of hard work or that glow he took on when he got to daydreaming about girls.

* * *

><p>His shoulders hurt, and that was the least of it. But it was noticeable as he pulled himself out of the General, then breathed out a quiet relief that Daisy chose to get out of the passenger side, leaving Luke to strain his own (not sore, not even slightly pulled to hear his cousin tell it, but he wasn't moving with his usual fluidity either, wincing as his hand went back in that automatic gesture to tuck in the back of his shirt as he stepped up to the curb) muscles in helping her out. Building fences with a sort of stoic gusto, because Luke had declared that the little distraction of giving directions to the sweet-looking lady from the Carnival of Thrills had left him a useless daydreamer, and he'd had to prove his cousin wrong.<p>

"Come on," Daisy was saying, leading them towards Rhuebottoms with Luke following along, as if they had any real intentions of helping her with the shopping. That hadn't been the plan, at least not in Bo's mind. Daisy's need for groceries was just the excuse they needed to leave the half-built fence to settle into the ground by itself for a few hours, to let the dirt get used to it being there or something, while his and Luke's (unhurt) arms and shoulders got a little bit of a rest. "I want to get there before—"

But they never did quite learn what the rush was, whether it was before all the canned beans got sold to someone else, or maybe it was so she could catch Enos spending his own pitiful little salary on soups that could be cooked on the little camp stove he kept in what passed for his kitchen. Because – and Daisy spotted it first, which went to prove that in spite of her rush to get to the store, she still knew what real priorities were – there was the most delightful distraction there, pinned on the concrete façade of the dry cleaner's. A hundred dollar prize for a pick-up race the likes of which Duke boys laughed at, right here in Hazzard. A look at Luke—

"It's the easiest hundred bucks we'll ever make," he said with a laugh at the poor Hazzard boys that were likely to show up with impossible dreams and no real hope of winning.

"You got that right," Luke answered and managed not to look like it hurt when he swung his arm out to shake Bo's hand.

—and the icing on the cake was those black-markered words at the bottom line of the poster board: _see Carnival of Thrills_. Which had, according to the poster above it, managed to rent the Hazzard Fairgrounds from Boss Hogg for a week.

He and Luke set to conspiring about strategy while Daisy walked off in a huff, still wanting to get to Rhuebottoms before whatever it was, which left them to drift where they were naturally going to, anyway: Cooter's. Just about spilling over with all their plans and they didn't even have to say anything specific. Just _race, Hazzard Fairgrounds, prize money_, and the mechanic was at his wall, doing mental calculations while pulling down this hose and that belt, some hardware and stuffing them all into a box. Because he knew the General and he knew Bo's driving, and between the two, he could reckon out what had gotten singed, dented or worn out to the point of being untrustworthy at high speed.

There was the usual haggling over the cost, Luke shucking and jiving and convincing Cooter that money could wait, wasn't halfway important anyway, and somewhere in the middle of that, the pretty little carnival lady walked in.

Things got fuzzy after that, a little warm and soft around the edges, his head humming and whirring with those _daydreams_ that fence-building was supposed to make him forget. Words were getting spoken, hell, some even came out of his own mouth, but he wasn't sure what they were. He wasn't listening, all his concentration was going to his eyes, watching the sun glint off that golden-blonde hair of hers, that absent minded habit she had of pushing a lock behind her ears, the white of her teeth as she smiled, the way she looked at him even when she was talking to Luke or Cooter, and how she didn't giggle or act silly around the Duke boys the way most Hazzard girls did. He was vaguely aware that she asked Cooter permission to hang posters in his garage and heard the acquiescence all full of whatever charm the mechanic could muster and couldn't help wishing that he had a public wall that he could offer to the lady – Diane Benson, the pictures at the top of her posters announced her name to be – just so she'd favor him with that same sort of gratitude that she was offering Cooter right now. Smart man, old Cooter was, having all these blank walls just begging for her to come happily over and decorate for him.

Some manner of small talk followed, Luke bragging about their chances of winning the little race she'd set up, Diane not quite being snowed by his cousin's confidence (which already made her smarter than the average Hazzard girl, except Luke just happened to be right this time), Cooter backing him up. More forgettable things being said, and then she was walking away. Next thing Bo knew, there was a meaty hand waving in front of his face, and that was a dirty trick, all that filth and grease wiping through the air where the back pockets of Diane's jeans had been filling his vision just seconds before. Luke was snorting and his head shaking at _daydreams_, but Bo was pretty sure those bright blue eyes had been appreciating her backside as she walked away, too.

* * *

><p>Home-turf races were laughable things by now. They hadn't much participated in any since that derby that Luke had both lost and won a couple of winters back. There hadn't been much point, ever since Cooter had deemed himself halfway a grown up, and Enos had spent too much time around Rosco and forgotten how to drive. Amy Creavy hadn't come back to show him up again, so there just wasn't any competition anymore.<p>

But hundred dollar prizes didn't grow on trees and they could make men forget how pointless a hometown race was (and the fact that Cedar City, which had never been good to the Dukes, had followed them right back here to Hazzard).

Bo's silly grin, the one that said this race was won before they'd even heard the rules, was an easy thing to look at, he could admit that. Saw it echoed in Daisy's smile, and then in the carnival-owner's, even as she was shouting out the rules and the prizes. Knew, right then and there, that this race might not be so laughable after all.

(Bo had two ways he could go – spectacular driver or spectacular crasher. He didn't do ordinary, hadn't ever just driven to a place for the sake of getting there in one piece. He went too far, too fast, swung the wheel to hard, steeped on the accelerator with too much firmness. Mostly it worked in his favor until he went sailing off the side of the road to land on his roof. On _their_ roof, because the car was half Luke's and that white helmet that sat in the passenger seat would only protect his head against so much banging.)

"Who knows," Diane Benson finished up her instructions to the drivers. "We might even throw in a full-time job with the show," and while Luke could agree that it was a fine way to motivate some of the marginal contestants to run the race of their life, his stomach sank down a fraction or two. Because Bo's brain was only so malleable. He wasn't sure it could hold both the image of crossing the finish line without causing either of them injury, and the thought of spending day after day working on close proximity to the woman who stood to their right, in those blue jeans that fit tight down over her hips and gave a man like Bo ideas that he couldn't shake.

His stomach dropped another millimeter or two just a few seconds later as he was fiddling with the straps on that white helmet, getting ready to pull it over his head and looking at Bo over there in the blue one, thinking how funny his cousin always looked when those blonde waves got covered up, and Miss Diane took that moment to single him out. Trotting over to the driver's side of the car and offering Bo a kiss and the words, "For good luck," that he didn't much need anyway, and it was clear she'd already picked favorites. Not only amongst the Duke boys (and that was okay with Luke, honestly – aside from happening to notice how well her jeans fit, he didn't really have any interest in her) but amongst all the competitors. And it made him wonder whether a hundred dollars in prize money was worth the risk – of winning _or_ losing.

"Bo," he admonished, or maybe it was more like he was playing the role of human alarm clock. "You'd best make up your mind whether you're driving or courting or this is likely to be embarrassing for the both of us." Didn't work, didn't startle his cousin out of that dream he'd been in since they arrived at this track, just earned him that silly, half-aware grin. She likes me, it said, and right about then Luke figured out that Diane Benson was an apple-bearing snake.

He didn't grow to like her any better after she fired the starting pistol and boys around them started rolling their cars right off the track in an attempt to impress her and sway her away from her already-chosen favorite. Hated her a little bit more when the wall of fire blossomed up on the track in front of them and what had been advertised as a straight race took on stunt-driving qualities at about a hundred miles an hour. Got even less amused than ever when they got to the open-country part and Rosco P. Coltrane joined in, sirens blaring and he figured it was a set up of the nature that got Duke boys busted for speeding when they thought they were involved in a perfectly safe little race.

He didn't care that Bo did seem to be holding to the road, that there had turned out to be room in his brain for driving and courting both. Winning was all well and good and a hundred dollars would come in handy when the time came to pay Cooter for the inner workings under the General's hood. But this Carnival of Thrills – well, he didn't figure that either him or Bo needed to get any more involved in it than they already were.

* * *

><p>They won. Of course they won, but still. It was worth celebrating, worth shaking Luke's hand over the top of the car as they climbed out, worth that hug that Daisy gave him when they walked around the ticking and hissing General as he cooled. It was worth the congratulations that Diane offered (it was worth a kiss, a better one than what she had planted on him when he was sitting in the driver's seat waiting for the race to get underway, but she didn't offer him one, even if his lips were all pursed and ready) and worth that glower that he got from the other guys who'd made fools of themselves out there trying to keep up with him.<p>

"Ah, shoot," he offered with all due humility, a verbal wink, because he was too good a sport to give her a real one in front of all these other men who wanted her (but had lost their chance at her) "'Tweren't nothing." Heard the mumbles of the other guys then as they assured each other that it had been a good race and got back into their cars to leave this little embarrassment behind. Daisy's arm was still around his neck or he might have assumed that she and Luke were leaving too. Didn't matter whether they were or weren't, what with every bit of his concentration going to Diane, who smiled so prettily to see that he'd won.

"Now, about that job with the show I mentioned," she said and finally, finally, took a step closer. Like maybe the kiss of congratulations was still coming, like maybe the job she wanted to offer was chief kisser and Bo didn't figure he'd have any problem fulfilling that role. "We need a top stunt car driver to make a thirty-two car jump."

That, on the other hand, he did have a problem with. Small one, really. The fact that it was laughable that he'd do it, was all. Sure he'd jumped things, narrow gaps and wide ones, some empty but for the drop below and others with one thing or another lurking inside them. Like that jump he'd done, mid-race, to get away from Rosco. Over a fallen tree in the ravine that marked off the edge of Jeb Tompkins' land, and sure it hadn't been without risk. He didn't mind risk, heck, his life as a moonshine runner was guaranteed to be full of it. Just, there had to be a purpose behind it. A reason to do it, other than that some crane operator had stacked up cars, and some carpenter had built a ramp, and some lady who ran a carnival thought it was a good idea to put those two things together and have herself a little show.

So he laughed along with Daisy when she told announced what a crazy notion that was. Didn't much care for Luke's utter negativity on the subject, and pointed out that the General (with him behind the wheel) could manage the jump with the right ramp, but was content to leave it at that. That he could, but wouldn't because there was no good reason to.

But Luke had never spent a content day in his life, could never let a single thing go. Drove the point home with the reminder that the last guy who'd tried that little stunt had wound up getting carted off in an ambulance while Bo's heart pounded in his ears as the adrenalin of wanting to go down there to the fairgrounds and help, to somehow _fix it _charged through his system.

"Do you always let other people do your talking for you?" Diane asked now. Just idle curiosity, a little thing she wanted to know, because if it was Luke's mouth doing all the talking then maybe there wasn't any reason to go kissing _Bo's_ lips.

"No ma'am," he declared, a little extra loud just to banish the thought from her mind.

It was then, finally, that the man that had been standing to Diane's side all along, dark look on his face and a certain sense of ownership about him, spoke up.

"Hey, Bo?" he said, without the benefit of a simple how-de-do. "You really think you're good enough to make that jump?"

It was enough, this stranger calling his skills into question, to bring Bo back to himself. To remember all the times that he and Luke had been called plowboys and hicks, mistaken for rubes when they entered dirt-track circuit races outside the tri-county area. Other drivers and the officials, none of whom had ever heard of Hazzard (and that was just fine with him, he didn't want them in his hometown anyway), making that same old mistake, assuming that because Hazzard's boundaries were small, so were the ambitions and skills of her residents. And though he'd made every one of those fools eat their words, he'd never taken a stupid dare from them, just because they issued it.

So, "With my eyes closed," he asserted with a smile for the bitter little man. "But," he added, arm going around Daisy's back to pat Luke, who was looking a bit sour and possessive himself, "my stunt driving days is gonna end after y'all pay me that money on Saturday."

"I see." Apparently meanness was catching and he ought to have worn a mask or something. Anything to keep the germs away, because Diane had suddenly come down with it, her face turning into a sneer, her eyes losing the twinkle they'd had in them every time she'd looked at him, just as quick as a light bulb getting switched off. "Why wait that long? Carl," and apparently that was the stranger's name. And the way he stepped forward, favoring one leg, indicated that she had him wrapped right around those skinny little fingers of hers, too. "Why don't you pay this chicken off so we can get out of here."

It was like a sucker punch in a barroom brawl. Enough to make him lose his breath and his sense of place, of time, of clarity. To make him gasp for air, then pull out all the stops in defending himself. To hear, and dismiss, the notion getting raised that Luke was his babysitter, to verbally push Daisy out of the discussion, to bore down on Diane and ignore absolutely everything else in the world. Daisy, Luke and Carl disappeared from his conscious mind because the woman in front of him had given him a good reason to go ahead and accept the dare.

He'd do the jump, even if Luke grunted and walked away from his side, and Daisy insisted he couldn't. Because he could, and when he did, "Maybe then me and the little lady here will have something nice to talk about. Bye, now."


	11. Flattery and Fights

_**Author's Note:** Happy New Year!_

_We're still in Carnival of Thrills, as you'll shortly see. There was no point in trying to come up with another silly title with either "carnival" or "thrills" in it. From here on I will try to have reasonably unsilly chapter titles._

_Thanks for joining me on this ride!  
><em>

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter Eleven - Flattery and Fights<strong>

It was ridiculous, just skirting the edges of funny except it made him want to hit something. Hard enough to take it down, to make whatever that thing was cry for mercy because (and as recently as yesterday he would have sworn such a thing to be impossible) Luke Duke, who was too smart and too mature to do anything fun or even halfway interesting anymore, was telling on him. Tattling like a foot-stomping four-year-old, all in a rage because his wishes hadn't been catered to. Luke said he shouldn't take the job at the carnival, and he just should have listened. Only in Luke's head could it be that simple.

If they hadn't been sitting at that same old, scratched up table the with scar at one end where Luke had been fool enough to put the old pan with the burnt duck straight onto the wood without benefit of a pad between, if the smell of Jesse's crawdad bisque hadn't been wafting up from the stove, he would have assumed it to be a dream. Or a nightmare. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the two.

Because there were good parts to this dream, too. If only he could get his kin to see them, but somehow all of Luke's grumpiness was trumping Bo's smile. He couldn't swear that he could remember a time when that had ever happened before.

Okay, so he'd turned down the prize money. For now, he'd turned it down today, but he was still going to get it on Saturday.

"And besides," he was telling the whole bunch of them, "Diane's going to give me an extra hundred and fifty bucks." Defending his decision to make the jump, because Jesse had decided to side with Daisy, who'd decided to side with Luke when the whole bunch of them were wrong. He_ could_ make the jump and, "There ain't going to be no funeral," he informed them all when Daisy suggested that the extra money could be used to bury him.

It was getting hard to smile in the face of all that disbelief and the many ways that his kin were calling him stupid. Luke, well, he'd come to expect insults to his intelligence from that quarter, and Daisy never did hesitate to point out to either of her male cousins all the many ways in which they were idiots. But Jesse—this was different. His uncle was supposed to have utter faith in him, if only because he always had.

"Besides," he tossed back at them, an edge creeping into his voice. Luke would tell him to count ten, but he was about dang sick of listening to Luke by now. "I ain't doing it for the money anyway." He had perfectly logical reasons for what he was planning (like wanting to hear nice words from Diane, like collecting that kiss he'd expected but never gotten when he crossed the finish line first) and he didn't appreciate all the suggestions that his brain had stopped working. "I'm doing it," he interrupted the negative words (and Luke's snide laugh) to announce, "so you and me" and that hard smile, the one his cousin used when things were a lot more annoying than funny, didn't fade at all, "can build up a big enough reputation to get on the NASCAR Circuit, is all. It's just something we been dreaming about since we's knee high to a grasshopper." Sounded like great reasoning to him, yeah. He'd go with that, since he'd already denied that his decision had anything to do with Diane (and the way she'd stopped looking at him like he was some sort of a Greek god when he'd told her he wasn't interested in doing the jump). Besides, there was truth in the statement, even if the notion had only just occurred to him. Sure, he could make a name for himself this way, maybe get himself spotted by a scout or two and when he got that call he'd make sure that Luke was a part of any deal he made.

"Bo." Or maybe not. His cousin's face had that smirk on it, the one that reminded everyone who the smart one was around here. Maybe he and his big old brain would rather stay here in Hazzard where they could have a quiet love affair with no one to get between them. Maybe Luke wasn't cut out for NASCAR anyway. "The boys on that NASCAR circuit are the safest, steadiest drivers in the world. Now the last thing they want on that track with them is some carnival hotshot with a lead foot and a brain to match." Nope, when Bo got that offer to drive on the NASCAR circuit, the last person he'd be inviting along would be Luke.

Heat in his face, tension across his shoulders, his mouth was already talking and he didn't even quite know what it was saying. Finding his feet and the tablecloth coming with him because he hadn't pushed his chair back and stood up like a gentleman. Luke's finger pointing at him from way down there because his cousin was still seated, still calling him stupid while Bo threw his napkin down in frustration. (Definitely not like a gentleman.) Leaning forward just to make sure Luke heard his point loud and clear and there it was. His cousin rising, slowly and with menace, to the challenge.

"Now just a minute, now Bo!" And Uncle Jesse, joining the fray, yelling at _him_, of course. Because the man who had raised them had chosen sides, had listened to only one of his boys and it wasn't—

"Yes, sir," he said anyway when Jesse told him to sit. And because he was a respectful man, he did what he was told and hung his head to show his obeisance. But only so far, not all the way down, because he wasn't done glaring at Luke. Not by a long shot.

There was a meal in front of them and grace to be said, so he and his cousin managed to unlock their eyes long enough for the words, "Dear Lord, we thank you for this bounteous table," to get droned out.

And to get interrupted by the ringing of the telephone, which didn't make any of them any happier, especially not Jesse who jerked his thumb at Bo and ordered him to get it. "Yes, sir," he answered back because he wasn't like Luke, he wasn't surly and defiant for no reason (even if he might have preferred to stay right where he was because after "Amen" came the eating and he was pretty darn hungry after doing all the work to win the race while Luke had just sat there in the passenger seat waiting for the moment to call him stupid—

And all his sour thoughts had to end right there, because he'd picked up the phone, said his hello and there was this incredibly welcome voice at the other end).

She didn't say hello, didn't identify herself or ask who she was speaking to. She didn't have to because she knew his voice as well as he knew hers and that had to mean something. Regret over sweet kisses she'd withheld and offensive words she'd doled out, and it sounded like she was there at the other end of the telephone line curled up on a couch, wearing something black and slinky and—okay, so he had a fertile imagination, everyone from Aunt Lavinia to school teachers had told him that. He might have been daydreaming her attire, but that invitation to come over, not to bother knocking, that was real. And though he could still hear Luke in the kitchen mumbling all his rotten little thoughts, it didn't matter. He could forgive the folly of a man who didn't know, who hadn't looked into Diane's eyes and seen the admiration there, who hadn't been the one offered a job, or asked to attend a private meeting right now. If anything he felt a little sorry for Luke.

Which made it easier to hang up the phone, to announce where he had to go and why, to face up to his cousins doling out guilt over the meal he was walking out on. To smile and tell Uncle Jesse that he meant no harm but he had a job to go to now. And when his uncle had graciously excused him and Daisy had tossed him her keys while Luke spoke of taking the General over to the garage to make sure he was in top shape for the jump, it gave him hope. Sure, his oldest cousin's pride had been stung but the way Diane hadn't ever given him a second look. But he was a reasonable man, and more than that he was family. When it came right down to it, Luke would be on his side.

* * *

><p>"Lukas, you go giving that engine any dirtier of a look and it's bound to up a quit out of spite."<p>

"Hand me that socket wrench," he said instead of answering. Because the General didn't care what kind of faces he made, all the car cared about was that he had clean oil and fresh belts. Human beings should be so easy to look after.

"Luke," Cooter said, and since there didn't seem to be any tool getting handed over, the Duke boy was forced to look up and catch his friend's eye. "He's a good driver."

"He's an idiot," Luke countered. Gave up and walked over to the toolbox himself, even if the mechanic was standing right next to it and it wouldn't have taken him any effort at all to reach in and pull out the tool he'd been asked for. "Besides," he added, waving the socket wrench he'd just picked up in the air for emphasis. "It ain't him that I'm worried about. It's that carnival." And the girl, the way she played him like a guitar, slow and quiet at first but building until she got his whole body to vibrate. And somehow or other, his cousin didn't know it, had no idea of the danger there. (Then again, the sight of a woman's curves always had blinded to boy to everything else.)

Cooter shrugged, finally managing to get himself to being fully upright from where he'd been leaning against the General's rear fender. Car ought to have a dent there from all the concentration the mechanic had been putting in to resting his weight there, and Luke would bet the two pennies and stick of gum that he had in his pocket (which were about the only things that he alone owned instead of sharing possession with Bo) that the man was hung over. Sure, he'd been making a show of being more responsible over the last few months, but deep inside there still lurked that same overgrown teenager.

"It's just a carnival, Lukas. One or another comes through here every summer."

"Yeah, and every summer we go and Bo gets on the rides and eats cotton candy until he's sick." The boy never had stopped loving sweet tastes and things that moved too fast, and he'd never learned that the combination of the two was disastrous, either. "Besides, you didn't see what happened in Cedar City. How the guy who tried to pull this same stunt Bo's supposed to pull crashed and they didn't halfway have the kind of people on-site that they should have, just in case."

Another thing Cooter missed was that little bit of pre-show fireworks, that passionate little kiss laid on the failed stunt driver by the very self-same little honey that had pulled Bo away from a family meal for a little one-on-one training. Somehow or other, though he'd cheered and clapped at the time, it seemed like Bo hadn't seen that moment of affection either, or he wouldn't be offering his lips up for the kissing now.

"I don't reckon you can get that bolt any tighter, no matter how hard you turn it." Cooter suggested, then raised his eyebrows and made a show of studying the fan belt when Luke glowered at him. There was no such thing as a too-tight bolt as far as he was concerned, and if he bruised his fingers in the name of ensuring the security of any hardware that he happened to come in contact with, well that was just his business, wasn't it. "Fly-by-night operation, huh?" the mechanic asked, getting back to the only important topic anyway.

"Kinda shady," Luke agreed. "Just looking for some poor sucker to get mangled up in a spectacular crash so they can earn some money."

"Well," Cooter put in. "Old Bo can drive, as long as he's looking at the road. But if the other day is any indication, that boy ain't got eyes for nothing but that Diane."

"You got that right," Luke answered back through gritted teeth as he tried to tighten down the bolt just that much more, but there was no budging it.

* * *

><p>Champagne. After a lifetime of moonshine, balanced by the watery concoctions that passed for alcoholic beverages at the Boar's Nest, the very idea of champagne was a breath of fresh air. It all was – the buzzing of workers on the fairgrounds when he pulled in, setting up ramps and hoops, the RVs parked around the edges, looking bright, clean and luxurious, and Diane. Diane especially, who'd told him not to knock, who'd stepped out of the shower in no more than a towel, who'd just made a toast: "to us." Nothing shy or coy about it. The girl knew what she wanted and she didn't pussyfoot around getting it.<p>

Bo brought the glass to his lips – it was only fitting to drink when a toast had been made, after all – and sampled what he'd never had the opportunity to before. Sweet, light, it tasted like hope. Like a bright future, and Diane's smile at him matched the flavor on his tongue.

"You have champagne often?" he asked, and instantly regretted it. He'd already confessed about how there wasn't a lot of champagne to be found in Hazzard. There was no way she could see him as anything but a hopeless hick now.

"Only when I'm celebrating," she said, her red lips, the exact shade of the dress she'd donned in only a few seconds time after emerging from the shower, fitting around the rim of the glass. It was enough to remind a man that he felt he was owed a few kisses.

"Celebrating?" Little crack in his voice there, and Luke would have laughed at it, but Diane didn't. She just smiled back at him after she'd finished her sip of champagne.

"Celebrating," she asserted. "You. Carl has started putting up posters around town advertising that you're going to be our star attraction." He liked the sound of those words, especially when she said them. Not the slightest hint of sarcasm or scorn, more like admiration. "And already sales are doing well."

Of course they were. There wasn't a single person in the county that hadn't heard about the Duke boys (except, maybe, for old Angus who was closer to deaf than not) and what they could do with a car. They'd jump at the chance for tickets to see Bo make the jump of his life. Old Luke, who never did see the bright side of anything (didn't even know there was a bright side at all, most days) would say that their townsfolk just loved a good crash, but that wasn't true. Rosco P. Coltrane crashed just about every single day of his life, and there wasn't a soul around who liked him enough to spend a dime to watch him do it.

* * *

><p>"All right, you boys in the General Lee," was what did it. It had been relaxing, almost pleasant. An afternoon spent communing with the inner workings of the General like he hadn't since those days when the car was in its infancy, making sure every part of him was in perfect working order. And then there had been the spoils of all his hard work – a perfectly purring engine and the opportunity to test it out on the open road. "Just a-pull on over. This is the law speaking."<p>

Rosco Coltrane had to go rearing his ornery little head. Those fumbling words getting hollered through the bullhorn (must've been one of those days when the sheriff forgot there was such a thing as CB airwaves on which to do all his yelling) that reminded him of who was next to him, and who was not. _You boys in the General Lee._ That was supposed to be him and Bo.

Not that he minded Cooter being in the passenger seat, challenging him to see what the General could do with the tacit suggestion that he lose one pesky sheriff's cruiser in some creative and spectacularly entertaining way. It was just that he wasn't Bo.

All right, so Bo was driving him nuts. It wasn't that big of a deal; Bo drove him nuts at regular intervals. Kind of like going into the barn each morning and knowing how unpleasant it would smell, and if it wasn't that bad you called it a lucky day, that was how it was with him and Bo.

There was, somewhere under all that pretty hair and face to match, a brain. He was sure of it, had seen it in action from time to time. Like days when the livestock didn't make too much of a mess of the barn, it could happen. He just reckoned it'd be best if today could be one of those times, when the boy could take a good, assessing look around him and see how he was being wooed and courted – and used.

But Luke had problems of his own to deal with first. Like skidding to a halt to avoid the truck that had, as they seemed to do in Hazzard often enough, blocked the road, like swallowing the pride that swelled up in him like a nasty little brat ready to kick out against the unfairness of it all, like having to face Rosco P. Coltrane without strangling him. (It had been a hard day. That was what he told himself as he forced his hands to grab Rosco's shoulders instead of some other, more easily damaged part of him.)

Cooter was there at his back, barking so Luke wouldn't bite, giving the sheriff a piece of his mind (when he didn't have any to spare) while Rosco stuttered, stammered and let loose with a few ijits and wijits about how they were gotten this time, in violation of the law. Not for speeding but—

And then the fool went and did something that ought to have been an excuse for Luke to take out all his frustrations on him. Should have made steam come out of his ears and had him counting to a thousand because ten wouldn't have been nearly enough. But it didn't.

It just gave him a terrible, wonderful idea.

Rosco kicked out the General's taillight, declaring the car a menace to society, dangerous and in need of impoundment.

And Luke grinned and let him do it. Because if Bo didn't have the good sense to recognize that what Diane wanted him to do was akin to suicide, it was only fitting to see to it that he didn't have a car to go killing himself in.

"Yep," he wholeheartedly agreed (with quite a bit of self-satisfaction, admittedly) to the sheriff's announcement that he was going to take the General away.

* * *

><p>The show car – Diane called it her best and it made him think that he needed to get her out in the General some day so she'd know what a good car really was – was clunky and slow to respond to the way he turned the wheel. Boxy and too big and, as he slapped on that blue helmet on and his eye drifted to the passenger seat, too empty. No one to roll eyes at him, forcing him to grin back, no one sneaking surreptitious glances (that were not as secretive as they were meant to be) at his harness to see that it was properly seated and fastened. No white helmet there to make him want to laugh about how old Luke resembled an egg, no index finger pointing resignedly forward telling him to go ahead and risk their necks one more time.<p>

Hard to say why he wanted Luke around most of the time. Sourpuss telling him what he couldn't do more often than not. But there it was, the empty space to his right.

Not that it mattered a whole lot right now, just like it wasn't important that car he'd borrowed from Diane's stock pile was sluggish. The little hop he was about to do amounted to nothing at all, no more than he'd done just driving over uneven road. And what he had in front of him was a clear runway and a carefully constructed ramp, then a string of five junkers.

Which he cleared with room to spare, landed cleanly and turned around to bring the car back to approximately where he'd started. Caught sight of that pretty little smile that Diane saved just for him as he pulled to a stop. Lost track of his right foot when he pulled himself out (and that was just another reason not to care for this car, what with how its windows couldn't much handle a man this size) had to hop a couple of times and by the time he was done with that, the lady in question was trotting right up to him.

"I'm gonna need at least another hundred feet in front of that ramp before I'm even going to make that jump with the General." Seemed like an obvious fact to him. Seeing how the cars had been stacked for the Cedar City show he was also going to need a bigger ramp, but first things first.

"Are you sure you've never done any stunt driving before?"

A shrug and, "Well, I fool around with cars a little bit." He was, he had been told, quite charming when he was humble.

"You've got it down to a science." And see, that right there. Just those words and he could forget that there'd been an empty passenger seat staring him in the face only seconds ago. Luke thought he was the stupidest creature to walk the earth. To Diane he was a genius. "I've never seen anyone take to this kind of thing so fast."

Hazzard, of course, had. They'd seen every trick in his book (and he really ought to thank Diane for giving them a new trick to show them), hardly even batted an eye when he did them anymore. But right here in front of him was a beautiful woman who'd been on the county carnival circuit for years, and she knew talent when she saw it.

All of Hazzard, including his family, took him for granted. Diane knew he was special, and she wanted him. More than anyone ever had, because there she went offering him an RV of his own. The thought made his heart speed up and his head spin.

_You didn't_, Jesse's voice mocked from that night a couple of years back when he'd wanted to move down to Macon with Jill Dodson, _think you was going to go down there and live with her without marrying her first, did you? Bring her home to dinner, and if you was to put that ring on her finger right here in this house—_

But his uncle wouldn't go offering Lavinia's wedding ring to him if he was getting ready to marry Diane. Not the way things stood right now, because even though he hadn't met her, Jesse didn't like Diane, thanks to Luke. He reckoned he had some damage to undo. And it was going to have to start with Luke. Who was, he suddenly remembered, back at the garage, tuning the General, just like he always did before a race. Seemed like his cousin was probably halfway to coming around. So Bo shrugged off his thoughts, kissed Diane goodbye, and headed for town.

* * *

><p>Sometimes it was hard to watch. The way that Bo trusted the world could hurt. Him more than his gullible cousin, in a lot of cases. Bo healed quickly enough. Sure, he'd shake his hand out after a fight, he'd limp and press fingers against a welt rising on his face. But his bruises never lasted, his injuries just about disappeared before they could get to looking ugly. He didn't hurt for long, so he never learned anything. He'd do the same thing over again and then stare in slack-jawed wonder as it went bad, just like it had the last time and the time before.<p>

It was hard to watch, because Luke knew. He'd learned to pick out patterns, to understand cause and effect. He'd see how his stubborn cousin was just about to get himself hurt again, and he'd try to stop it, but it was like stepping in front of a freight train. Best not to do it unless you were willing to get run down.

It was hard to watch, but he did it anyway. Maybe this time he wanted it to hurt a little, to leave an impression that lasted for more than the few seconds it took to shake it off. Maybe it was petty.

The car, he could certainly blame it on the white car with the Carnival of Thrills logo on the door that Bo showed up in. Diane's face plastered right there for the whole town to see, and in less than a day she'd just about branded Bo to her pasture. He didn't like it.

Temper, he wasn't supposed to let it get the better of him. Childhood whippings and lectures about responsibility had worn that into him like a groove. So he stayed calm, just chatted all friendly-like with Bo there in the dark of the garage while Cooter and Daisy looked on. About how he'd kept to his end of their unspoken bargain, tuning the General until he sang with perfect pitch. Just bit into his apple and watched Bo's face open up into that loose, trusting grin.

It was hard to watch, even if it was devastatingly easy to actually do. Took him just three seconds to crush all the hope and faith his cousin had put into him.

"He had just one problem, and that was a busted taillight. And though Rosco kicked it out himself, he saw fit to impound him." Delivered with brutal cordiality, like Bo was nothing more than a nosy neighbor that had to be treated pleasantly even as they were loudly noticing that the Dukes sure did seem to keep a lot of mason jars around their barn.

"And knowing Rosco," Cooter put in, just to show whose side he'd taken in this little family dispute. "He could be anywhere."

For a second or two, Bo maintained his faith that none of them would ever do anything to get in his way. Just a moment as he looked from Luke's face to Cooter's and finally Daisy's, seeing that there was solidarity there, a little band of conspirators that he couldn't be a part of.

Then it wavered, shook, shattered. Got hidden behind a mask of anger, but Bo's eyes were too shiny, too wet. Bo's recognition, suddenly, that he'd dug a moat around himself, and filled it with his silly stunt-driving aspirations, that he'd turned himself into an island within his own family.

It was hard to watch.

* * *

><p>"I've got shotgun!" Cooter called.<p>

"You always get shotgun," was just habit. The mechanic had been claiming shotgun on Duke-Davenport car trips since Luke was first entrusted to drive them anywhere, back before Bo's legs had grown and his shoulders had widened, and Cooter had been bigger than him then. Even now that Bo towered over him, their friend was still slippery as a greased hog, moving deceptively quickly to get into the passenger seat.

Which – Bo wasn't too sure he wanted to be sitting next to his traitorous cousin anyway, not when Luke had gotten the General into this mess in the first place, but – it rankled him. Because Luke didn't fight for him, didn't say he wanted Bo up front with him and maybe, just this once, he should have. (Maybe he couldn't, not with the way Bo had been up in his face pointing out how _wonderful_ this particular Luke Duke plan had been, how a little bit of spite had led to the General – who was half Bo's, and maybe more than that by now, considering Bo had won most of the prize money that went to buying him the high-performance parts that kept him humming – getting taken on his final ride. To the crusher where, unless Luke stopped checking the rearview mirror to make sure everyone was safely in the four-wheel drive vehicle they'd all piled into and started driving, the General would meet his demise. Stinging pride from having all his failed brilliance pointed out to him, and maybe Luke couldn't bring himself to remind them all that he and Bo were a team.)

Luke made up for his slow start by barreling overland, pushing through slow moving livestock with horns blaring, just about tipping the vehicle as they bounced from grass to roadbed. And his cousin had the gall to claim moral high ground when it came to Bo's driving skills.

He had to squint between Luke and Cooter's bodies in the front seat to see it, but it was a blessed vision. The General (and this was why he needed to be up front instead of stuck back here, because yes, Cooter had a reasonable hand in keeping the General running, but he and Luke had done the conceiving, the creating, the downright raising of their car and this was their fight) was still in one piece. But he was in the air, no dirt beneath his wheels to give him the traction he'd need to get out of this mess. Like a catfish dangling off a hook at the end of a fishing line.

Luke jerked the four-wheeler to a stop without much respect for its brakes, and they all bailed out to rescue the General. Tried, of course, to be good neighbors and to play by the rules. To pay the impound fee (and it was fitting that the cash came out of Luke's pocket when he was the one who got the General into this mess in the first place) and to do this all legal like.

But old Clem, who'd taken over as foreman when Cooter quit working the junkyard a few years back, slapped the money out of Luke's hand.

Fist curling, arm swinging and before he knew what was happening, Bo had smashed Clem across the jaw. Because the foreman had hit Luke first, and even if they were spatting, there was no one that was allowed to hit one Duke boy without feeling the wrath of the other.


	12. Broken Hearts and Bruises

_**Author's Note:** Finally, at the end of this chapter, we diverge from canon. One little decision made differently because the Dukes were still running moonshine, and a whle new plot line popped up._

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter Twelve - Broken Hearts and Bruises<strong>

Quiet, all he wanted was a moment of solitude, and maybe he was fool enough to think he'd earned it. Instead what he got was a constant nattering about how it was all his fault until he was getting ready to shove a dirty sock down Bo's throat just to make him stop. He tried, again, to count ten.

Only made it halfway past four when it started up again, how close the General had come to being a twisted hunk of nothing and Bo really hoped he was proud of himself.

He might have told his cousin to shut up. None of the three of them would ever know, because Bo was hollering over him and Daisy was sitting between them, doling out mean little pinches and telling them both to knock it off.

"Ow," might have been the last word on the subject.

His jaw hurt and it wasn't just because he'd gotten socked a few times in the junk yard. There was also the tooth grinding he was doing because all he needed was a long enough span of peace to count his ten (and then another ten after that) but there was clearly no way he was going to get it.

He would have thought that beating the tar out of a foreman and a few crane operators would have released some of the tension between the Duke boys. A good fight was usually like a good swig of moonshine, leaving them happy and relaxed.

He might also have expected Bo to have noticed that he'd been the one who actually saved the General through some acrobatics, a touch of violence, and his knowledge of heavy equipment. It was him that lowered the car to the ground so he could be driven away. He might have expected a little gratitude. (He might have known that it was a little too much to ask. What he'd done was no more than obligatory. He'd put the General into jeopardy, he had to get him out.)

"You're just lucky, Luke," came at him again, and the counting started over from the beginning. "Another few seconds and…"

The driveway to the old farmhouse loomed and in a lifetime of riding these old roads, the trip had never seemed so long. He skidded to a stop under the gnarled oak tree, kicking up enough dust to make the chickens sneeze, had they been out and about. Blissful silence as the shock of the gesture made both of his cousins reach for the dashboard.

He might have thought that the speed with which he pulled himself out of the window would make its own point about how little he wanted to continue the conversation. (He might have thought his tongue-bitten silence would have given that away one heck of a lot earlier.) But he'd barely had the chance to reach back to stuff his shirttail into his jeans when he heard the telltale sound of denim scraping on metal, and knew whatever breathing space he might have wanted wouldn't be coming any time soon.

He was a good boy, he held the door for his kin, let them precede him into the house where their uncle greeted them over his folded newspaper without the slightest knowledge of how he was just stirring that pot of stew that was brewing in Bo's head. "The General sounds all rescued and raring to go."

He might have hoped that turning away from the whole babbling bunch of them and drawing himself a glass of water would let him out of the conversation, and that swallowing the cool liquid would keep him from saying all those things he'd been trying to keep to himself. (He might have known that there was no way out of this thing without some nasty words getting said.)

Bo was blaming him and that was all very tidy. Believable, even, perfectly sensible if you only looked at half the story and if you believed that the General had truly been rescued. As far as Luke saw it, this was just a momentary reprieve for the car, which would surely be violently destroyed if Bo jumped it for the likes of Diane Benson and her carnival.

"It was him that got us into this mess, just because some lady made a pass at him." He'd tried to keep his tongue still. Swear on ten Bibles, he did.

He might have expected Jesse to jump in there, to drop some pearls of wisdom or a thinly veiled challenge that made Bo see the error of his ways, like he had with Jill Dodson a couple of years ago. But the old man seemed to be fresh out.

And what happened next was why he'd just about bitten his tongue off to keep himself from adding fuel to the fire. Because this was what Bo wanted, to jab at him, to keep on pushing against his resistance until he forgot all about his better intentions.

"I'll be the first to admit that Bo here has got a pretty face," might have sounded like compromise to anyone that didn't know better. "I just wish he had the brains to match."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Bo, the lady has been around. She's run into hundreds of guys, now why is she making a play for a country boy like you unless she's got an angle?" That, right there, was precisely the sort of thing he'd wanted to keep to himself until he could find a better way to ask it. But Bo had insisted that Jesse let him talk.

And now those dark blue eyes were squinted down, that chin was lifting itself in defiance. His cousin was mouthing off about how Luke was just jealous and what made him think Bo couldn't give the _lady_ something she needed, and—

"Well, sure. An amateur driver to do a crazy stunt that damn near killed the last guy. Or ain't it ever occurred to you that she might be playing you for a sucker."

Yep, that had done it.

"You're just lucky we're in Uncle Jesse's house, that's all!"

He might have hoped it wouldn't come to this, but then again, Bo wasn't the only one with a temper.

* * *

><p>He was not one to sass and disobey his uncle. Old Jesse had taken them in even though he didn't have to, and had done his best to raise them to respect their elders. Luke was always the one who stood up to the man, resisted and just about begged for whippings.<p>

Jesse had told them to stop before they did something they'd regret for the rest of their lives. Good advice, but it came too late. Because Luke was the one that had done the doing, and Bo was the one left to regretting.

He'd tried to end this thing. He'd pointed out that they were in their uncle's house and there could be no fighting there. It would have been a fine time for Luke to go storming off to their room, but he hadn't. He'd just dropped his voice into that deadly range, the one he saved for idiots that would try to mess with the Dukes (and how many times had Bo heard that tone used when Luke was defending him), and answered back, "We can always step outside."

By the time Jesse was pleading for calm, there was no going back. Bo was duty-bound to pound some sense into his cousin.

There was, for the briefest interim between the smacking sound of his fist crashing into Luke's face and the thud of that muscled body crashing to the ground, a sense of satisfaction. Didn't last nearly long enough, not when his cousin stayed down for a second as if he really hadn't expected to get hit, and Bo took used that little span of time to consider whether maybe Jesse was right about what he shouldn't have done. Hard look in those blue eyes that girls always said were so pretty (but they didn't know, had never seen Luke's intellect shut down in deference to his temper, would never believe how cold and mean a stare his cousin could level) and even before the words came, Bo knew that any chance for being rational with Luke had passed.

"Cousin, you just started something you ain't half man enough to finish."

From there it was dirt and grass, rocks and roots poking into his back as he landed hard, more than once. It was bones, under a thin layer of skin, bashing against each other, it was trying to get back on his feet after being knocked off of them over and over, it was pushing and punching (it was voices in the distance, disembodied and faint like they were coming through a thick fog, tell them to stop, stop, stop) it was the metallic taste of blood in his mouth and the smell of livestock as they fell into the straw of the goat pen, exhausted but neither of them ready, not even slightly ready, to admit defeat.

Then it was the sound of Jesse's gun. A moment to realize that despite the pain in his hands, his face and most of all, his chest, he hadn't been shot. And then it was their uncle telling them to get on their feet, stop acting like jackasses, and apologize to one another.

He wasn't one to sass or disobey his uncle. He didn't like the angry looks he got whenever he had done so as a kid, and he wasn't overly fond of the feel of the whip against his backside, either. But he would not, without proper retraction of all the nasty words Luke had said about Diane (who was innocent in all of this, just a victim of bad luck with her carnival and good taste in her men), shake Luke's hand or accept that insincere apology.

So if Uncle Jesse, standing over there with his gun still raised, looking so old and sad, wanted whip him, so be it.

* * *

><p>Fighting was easier, he could admit that in the quiet of his own head. If he were a bigger man he'd say so to the man who had tried to drill the notion into his head years ago: <em>you were right, Uncle Jesse. Hitting is easier than talking.<em>

Hitting was also easier than thinking.

If the whole drive from the junkyard had been the calm, and most of the discussion in the kitchen had been before, the moment that Bo pulled out that squint-eyed bluff about how lucky Luke was that they were in their Uncle Jesse's house was the unleashing of the storm. Crash of thunder, crackle of lightning and wind gusts powerful enough that no man could expect to hold onto his rationality through them. Just accept the violence as it came, and dole out as much as was necessary to keep the upper hand. (Okay, so some part of him did keep thinking, even through the brawling. About restraint, pulling punches and not killing anyone.) A good, cleansing sort of a squall, pruning his mind of things he didn't want to hold onto. A chance to start fresh.

But when the sweet adrenalin stopped coursing through him, all that was left were the memories. Of Bo's face, the puff of his chest and tilt of his chin, of bravado and righteousness, and how it changed. How, when they got done rolling in the dust and getting yelled at, after the gunshot had gone off and they'd been ordered to make up, once his apology had been decidedly rejected and he'd tried once more to explain his logic, Bo had walked away.

"I guess this farm's just gotten a little too small for both me and Luke."

It had sounded strong and sure of itself, and those first stumbling steps his cousin had taken away from him had been clear in their intent. But those dark eyes had been too wet, that posture slumping until Bo wasn't any taller than their uncle.

Damn it, he'd made Bo cry, hadn't done that since they were kids and as much as he'd always been competitive and wanted to win, it hadn't ever made him happy to see his cousin's face go splotchy red as the tears started. Besides, it hadn't even been Bo he wanted to hurt (and somewhere around the time that his fists clenched again as a reflex of that thought, their uncle had started crying too). He'd never intended for anything to change, he didn't want Bo to go and he—(wasn't allowed to hit girls. Wasn't a hard edict to live with most of the time, but his cousin had been there, letting Jesse wipe the blood and mucus from his nose that Luke had put there, and it had risen up in him, the urge to deck Diane for the way_ she_ was hurting Bo and_ Luke_ was taking the blame).

That first round of thinking had been hard enough. When, after he'd watched that terrible little scene where Jesse, instead of imparting lessons about family, had just about tucked Bo into the General like he used to tuck him into bed, then all but kissed his head and said goodbye, he'd gone into the bathroom to clean up, then into his room to change out of his dirty clothes. He'd taken a few extra minutes of quiet in there to let the emptiness of Bo's side of the room sink in, and Daisy had made her way into the doorway.

"You done being mad?" had only been wisdom. Everyone knew (even if they didn't always listen to their instincts) that it was smart to leave Luke Duke alone until his temper cooled.

"Yeah," he'd answered, and it had taken so much effort to get to his feet and accept the hug she needed to dole out. Bo hadn't been there for her to console, so it was only fair to let her get her mothering out on him.

It was always easier when the fists were flying, when anger coursed through him like an overdose of caffeine. Afterward it took so much effort to summon up the energy to swagger with bravado, to pretend nothing hurt when it was hard just to stand up and face his kin.

The second wave of remembering was even worse. He was locked up by then, Enos' friendly-looking visit to the Duke farm turning quietly hostile and without Bo at his side Luke didn't even remember how to run from the law anymore. He'd let himself be brought here to the jail where there was nothing to do but sit on the thin mat of the hard cot and think back on the day, to try to reason a new way out of it, but he couldn't.

Love. That was what Jesse wanted to call this thing that was pulling Bo under its spell, but it couldn't be that. Nothing that happened in one day then tore you away from your family forever could be called love. Pride, maybe. Foolishness, idiocy, gullibility.

He was angrier at Bo than he'd ever been and he'd wanted to teach the boy a lesson. He didn't want him to leave.

Free will. That was the other thing his uncle kept harping on. That Bo was his own person (and sure he was, they were all their own people, but they were still Dukes, and that was supposed to be more important than anything) and had to learn his own lessons.

But you didn't let a baby play with fire, even if it was bright and attractive, you didn't let a blind man drive your car, and you didn't look to a drunkard for brilliant insights. Bo had free will and the rest of them had an obligation to keep the damn fool from using it to hurt himself.

Thud, clank, rattle, and he wasn't alone. Here came the damn fool himself. (And though he was accompanied by the sheriff, for once Luke didn't think that Rosco P. Coltrane was the dumbest man in the room.)

* * *

><p><em>You're too sensitive, Bo<em>.

It was one of those things Luke used to say to him with head-shaking superiority. Too sensitive. And maybe he had been, maybe he still was, but hearing it didn't ever make him feel any less sensitive, just like pulling a scab off an old cut didn't make it heal any faster.

Too sensitive, too sensitive, and here he was driving away from his home, looking out at the road through a kaleidoscope of tears while Luke stood back there, unmoved. Surrounded by the family that he'd swayed to his point of view, not even having the decency to have a sore hand after the kind of hits he'd doled out, and if Bo was _too sensitive_, at least he wasn't that. Hard, mean, bitter, above pain. Seemed to him that Luke wasn't sensitive enough, and that's what he answered back to that nagging voice in his head that kept telling him he was too sensitive.

He'd chosen sides and there was nothing left to do but retreat and lick his wounds. To go to where he was wanted and leave behind everything that used to be important to him. And that right there was the thing Luke couldn't begin to understand – Diane had never once called into question his intelligence, she'd never nagged him about what he couldn't do. Maybe it hurt to walk away from his family, but the choice wasn't nearly as hard as it would have been if Luke had ever, once, believed in him.

It was enough, the anger behind that thought, to get him to the fairgrounds, out of the car and into Diane's RV where he slapped that divider thing that separated the driver from the living quarters in lieu of what he still wanted to do to Luke.

"Here," and it might have been right about then that he realized he wasn't alone. "Maybe this'll cool you off. That was some entrance."

Damn it, it was protecting Diane from his cousin's lousy behavior that had made him take to fighting in the first place, but he wasn't any better, barging in here like he had.

So he swallowed down the beverage he was offered and made himself private vows about what more he'd say to Luke when he got the chance. Smiled for Diane instead, because the beer she'd handed him finally washed the taste of dirt and blood and tears out of his mouth and made him feel halfway human again.

Diane was soft and malleable to Luke's rigid inflexibility. She offered respite, solutions, a loan, an RV, and her open arms. One kiss and anything that felt like a problem was instantly forgotten.

It was some hours later, right around the time that Rosco showed up with his wijits and ijits and ready handcuffs that he figured it out. Despite Jesse's kind-hearted and gentle reminder, the farm couldn't be his home anymore. Leastwise not until Luke's attitude toward Diane changed and since that was scheduled for the twelfth of never, he didn't expect he'd ever wake up in that same bedroom with the banging radiator and the serpentine crack on his side of the ceiling. So he'd leaned back on the General's warm fender, enjoyed the feel of that soft hand in his, and looked out at the fairgrounds. Smell of gasoline, show cars mingling with the heaps that's be piled up for him to jump, shouts of carnival workers as they set up ramps and hoops and colored flags everywhere. It wasn't a farm, didn't have chickens, wide spans of greenery or even an old leaky roof, but he reckoned he could live with it.

But first he had to deal with getting arrested by an incompetent man. The endless drive back to town in the cruiser that had a hard enough time staying on the road when it wasn't dragging a stock car behind, and when he found himself reaching for the wheel as they bumped over the old road, he figured maybe he wouldn't live long enough to have to worry about bail. But finally the courthouse loomed, followed by the squad room and the narrow stairway down into the dungeon of a jail, made all the darker and less pleasant by who was already down there. Luke.

Like he already knew they were fighting, or maybe because it was the first time he'd ever hauled in the Duke boys in singles instead of pairs, the sheriff put them in separate cells. Didn't matter, it was still closer than he wanted to be to that rotten jerk and—

He didn't even realize he was hollering at Luke and getting argued back with until Boss started to giggle with glee at the notion of Duke fighting Duke. In what he figured was probably the last tacit agreement in their lives, he and Luke shut up. The only thing worse than the sight of each other was the sight of Boss Hogg getting glee out of them arguing.

Besides, he didn't have to bite his tongue for very long anyway. Carl from the carnival was there in minutes, peeling bills off a wad – tickets really must be selling well – and cutting him loose with a speed that went to show just how much Diane had to love him. (No one, apparently, loved Luke the same way. Or, well, Bo loved him, he was still kin. Which was why he offered to get him out some fine day. The fact that it came out as a nasty little gloat couldn't be helped, not when Luke wouldn't give an inch, wouldn't look to see what was there just as plain as the nose on his face.)

Smiled at his good fortune all the way up the steps and out of the courthouse, where like to good boy his uncle had raised him to be, he said his thank-yous to the man who had freed him. Got an earful of what a fool he was and he would have sworn it was Luke standing there with him after all. Sour, bitter little words that he smiled through just as he always had, because he knew how to handle naysayers. And figured that, as long as he was hitching himself to Diane and the carnival, it was just fitting that Carl was a part of the deal. Because with a near carbon copy around, he wouldn't have to go missing Luke.

* * *

><p>About the only decent part of the day was the twilight car chase that didn't last nearly long enough before he lost the revenuer on Possum Hollow Road. But that came later, and first he had to get through yet another setback.<p>

He knew better. Would have told his sneaky family so if they'd asked him but they didn't. They came and paid the bail on him with misleading smiles and hugs, then just about hijacked their own vehicle, turned it the wrong way, and took him to the fairgrounds and Bo.

To make things worse, he figured; ever since that woman and the little circus of cars (and freaks, like that Carl who'd come to bail his cousin out, but looked like he'd just as soon spit in his face and call him a hick or a rube) that orbited around her, everything between him and Bo had gone steadily downhill.

It wasn't, no matter what Jesse wanted to keep calling it, love. It was Bo being Bo: rash, foolish, deaf to logic it was—

Luke had a temper, he could admit that. He'd never really denied it and he'd accepted the whippings that it earned him even as they provoked a greater fury inside him. Because somewhere between the lightning strike of anger and the thunder of his fists flying, he knew better.

What no one had ever been willing to recognize was that Bo had a temper, too. Maybe because half the time he wore it well, looking downright cute with his eyebrows down like a cranky bunny rabbit, and who could take that seriously? But there were other times when he'd turn his back and go marching off in some sort of protest that only he understood. Times like that it was best to let him stomp it out of his system, because before you even got around to wondering where he'd gone to, he'd be back. Sometimes hollering, sometimes sheepish, sometimes just plain hungry and ready to make whatever sort of peace would get him a good meal, but Bo always came back. Until Diane.

It wasn't love, it was stubbornness and selfishness and anyone who would let a woman come between him and his family didn't deserve the name Duke.

Oops, seemed likely he'd said that last part out loud, because there went Jesse, calling a halt to the mission, getting out of the Jeep and trying to start a brawl with him. Fists up, circling and calling Luke a prideful fool, then the lecturing about what family meant that left him nostalgic and hopeful all at once. Maybe, he figured in those seconds before Jesse's antics got so silly that he couldn't help but laugh, it was more important to be sorry than to be right. And if he could manage to apologize and mean it, just maybe Bo would come home.

But it had worked out just about as badly as he'd always known it would. (And that the thing Bo would never admit—he was quick enough to say that Luke thought the worst of everyone, but he never could get around to confessing that most times, Luke was right.) Diane had flirted with Jesse and made Daisy's jaw clench and teeth grind at the notion, then given them free rein to talk to Bo. As soon as he took a practice jump off the big ramp, she amended. Luke couldn't watch but he couldn't take his eyes off it and before he could get around to cringing, the General's tire blew. Everything after that was running, pictures of carnage in front of his eyes like a slideshow of Bo's last minutes on earth, and then it stopped.

Bo emerged just as healthy and just as stupid as he always had been. Walking down off the ramp to talk to them and sure, there was a moment in the middle of their discussion when it looked like he'd understood Luke's apology to be real, to recognize the importance of family.

"Speaking of family, you know it's going to take three good men to plow and plant that back forty," Luke said. Code talk, because he'd be damned if he'd go announcing to Diane what they _really_ did for a living. Let her think Bo was a sodbusting farmer with uncanny talent behind the wheel, let her think she was trying to rescue him from a lifetime of farming. Only family knew for sure that they were moonshiners and Diane was not now, and if Luke got his way she wouldn't ever be, a part of his family.

"It sure will cousin, it sure will," Bo had grinned back, that smile that made otherwise gloomy days worth facing, the thing that hadn't been aimed at him since before he let Rosco impound the General.

"Then we can count on you." Not a question, because he didn't want it to be, didn't want to make it sound like saying no was an option.

"You sure can. With all that money I'm going to make doing that stunt driving, I'll be able to get y'all enough hands to plant four or five hundred acres at least." Which only went to show how far Bo had drifted from his roots, that he would suggest outsiders as reasonable help for the Dukes and their business.

Nothing to do but walk away, because he'd known better. From the moment his kin had told him where they were headed, he'd been fully aware of the foolishness of the effort. He should have stuck to his guns on that, but Jesse had gotten his hopes up, and what good had it done any of them? None at all.

He drove home and for once Daisy let him get behind the wheel of her jeep without asserting rights to it. Maybe it was repentance for having brought him out here against his will (and maybe it was pity for the best friend that he was losing, but there was no reason to go dwelling on that).

Halfway home and Daisy pointed out a blue Plymouth following at a conspicuous distance—far enough back to pretend he just happened to be going this way too, and close enough to ensure he wouldn't lose sight of the Dukes if they made any false moves.

"I wonder if he's following us," Jesse said, and there was nothing to do but put that driver back there to the test, so Luke swerved onto Possum Hollow Road, kicking dust behind them. Blue emerging through the haze of it and Luke knew.

Had to be a revenuer. Buchanan had been assigned to Hazzard for six months by now, and by recent standards, that was an awfully long tenure. Which meant it was time for fresh blood, and this fool behind them was tailing them as if they'd be dumb enough to carry contraband in an open, white vehicle before dusk had fully fallen over the land. If he had been in a better mood, Luke might have stopped and offered the newcomer a how-de-do, but days of trying to drill sense into Bo's thick skull (which was well protected by too much hair, and that only made it all the harder to reach any reasoning part of him) had left him without manners. So he picked up speed and while the car behind him tried to compensate and catch up without appearing to be obvious, Luke pulled a one-eighty that came awfully close to tipping them. Charged back at the fool in the blue car, watched him waver then drive off into the sugar sand on the shoulder. He'd be there spinning his wheels for days, and maybe by then Luke would feel hospitable enough to go back and rescue him.

But for now he had more pressing problems. Like the need to come up with another plan to keep Bo from killing himself in the name of impressing a selfish and manipulative woman.


	13. Too Much Time to Think

**Chapter Thirteen - Too Much Time to Think**

The thing about girls was—

No, not girls, because he'd been with more than his share of girls and it was good. It was fabulous, actually, and he wouldn't give up a single memory, but none of them had been like this. Like love.

So, the thing about love was, it got into all the cracks, all the holes where friends and family had banged him around and left gouges on him like wounds. Smoothed things over, filled in the scrapes, leveled the bumps, eased the knots.

It was getting late now and most of the days of his life twilight had smelled of hay and livestock, of hard work and sweat and Luke there next to him, rivaling the goats for stinkiest critters in the barn. He should have been lifting or shoving something heavy, but he was sitting quietly with Diane's hand in his.

Sure, there were things he'd get around to missing about the life he'd walked away from. But it wouldn't hurt, not for long. Because the love of this girl filled up all those spaces that breaking away from his family had left behind.

And this was the thing Luke would never understand, because he'd never known this sort of love. There'd been opportunities, but his cousin had run them all off with the sort of determination you'd use to chase a fox out of the henhouse. All he'd had to do was grab on with both hands, but Luke had kicked and fought against love every time. And the sensation of warmth, the soft give where Diane's shoulder leaned up against his, left Bo feeling just the slightest bit sorry for his bitter cousin.

"Let's go inside," she interrupted his thoughts in the voice of intimacy, and it was good. The best offer he'd had in years and he'd be a fool to do anything other than accept. So he followed her in, heard the flimsy door slam behind them. Closing against the evening air that he'd breathed for every season of his life.

* * *

><p>Too much time, too much quiet. No one to get in the way of his thoughts and maybe he'd always wished for this. Maybe he'd wanted it enough that one day years ago, he'd begged his uncle for the opportunity to pull out one of the old strap muzzles in the barn and use it on Bo's flapping lips.<p>

And maybe he'd liked complaining. Maybe it had been, under all the frustration and annoyance, fun. To let Bo wind himself up and turn himself loose in a hollering, finger-pointing frenzy, then to lodge an official protest with their uncle about how it was too loud around here and how could he be expected to think?

Could be he'd thought Bo relished the game as much as he did, gave as good as he got and appreciated the challenge. Maybe he was wrong about that and maybe he and Bo had always been too possessive of each other anyway. Thick as thieves, doing everything as if they were of one mind when they both knew they weren't. They were just twice as fast, (twice as stubborn) and twice as strong together so they'd made a tacit pact to let nothing could get at them or split them up—neither lawmen nor outlaws.

But Diane did. She walked right up and stepped into a little crevice that they didn't even know was there, and made herself at home. And Luke—well Luke had helped her, he supposed. Sure, she'd placed that wedge between him and Bo, had taken a couple of whacks at driving it deeper. But Luke was farm-bred and had a lifetime's worth of mule-stubborn muscle in his arms, so when he took a swing at that thing between him and Bo, he wound up driving it halfway to China. Or halfway to a suicide attempt, because that's what that Leap for Life stunt was. Today the General had saved his fool cousin's life by blowing a tire, but tomorrow, in front of the crowd…

Too quiet, and he could think each individual thought until it twisted in his stomach like a bayonet. He'd earned all this space around him with every nasty word he'd said, every time he'd argued against what Bo should do. Now there was nothing left to do but think so he stayed right where he was and did just that until Maudine nickered quietly at him, maybe in sympathy, maybe asking where that loud guy was that usually helped with the nightly chores. Then again, she might just have been telling him that if it was all the same to him, she'd like to sleep now and would appreciate it if he'd move along. After that it was Daisy coming out to ask him what he'd been doing out here this long and wouldn't he like to come inside and have some warm cocoa? As if it was cold or he was a little boy, but her mothering instincts had kicked in. Jesse was too old to suit her purposes and Bo was missing all together, which meant that Luke would simply have to do for now. He wasn't five, he wasn't thirsty, she wasn't his mother, but he followed her in anyway, because by then he'd worked it out. Enough time out there alone in silence, and he'd managed to formulate a perfectly horrible plan.

"I reckon," he told his kin (or two-thirds of his kin, because the other one had left home to get away from him) "y'all ought to head over to Cedar City. Tonight," he added as he turned the cup of too-sweet liquid in circles on the table, letting it cool or maybe thicken to sludge because even if Daisy needed to make it for him, he didn't much want to drink it. "And see if you can't find that Bob Dexter guy who crashed last week when we saw the carnival there. Maybe he can tell you something that will help us save Bo." Because there had to be something that had made that car lose power and just about nosedive into the pile below it, and the explosion had come too quickly. At least he thought it had, he hadn't been paying as much attention as he should have been. He'd been too consumed with holding onto Daisy, but then he hadn't known at the time that Bo would be trying the same fool thing this week.

"Tonight?" Daisy asked back. "I don't suppose there's any hospital in the city that's going to have visiting hours this late. Why don't we wait until tomorrow?"

Because then his lousy plan wouldn't stand half a chance of working.

"Because the Carnival is at noon tomorrow, with Bo's jump scheduled for one. If you wait until tomorrow, you ain't gonna have enough time to try to figure out what happened and get back here to save Bo."

With a pat to Daisy's skinny little hand, Jesse added, "I think Luke might have a point there. I reckon it wouldn't be so terrible to head out there now. We might need some time to find this Bob fellow."

"And maybe even whatever's left of his car," Luke added. "Maybe if you look at that you can figure out whether it was driver error or mechanical failure."

"All right," Daisy agreed with a frown. A girl needed beauty sleep, but then again maybe she could lose one night of it in the name of saving Bo. "But why ain't you coming with us? What are you going to do?"

"Stay here and try to talk some sense into Bo."

"That ain't gonna work." Yeah, he reckoned that was probably true. It was a terrible plan, but if there was any chance of it working, they each had to do their parts. And for Jesse and Daisy, that meant getting out of town and staying there until they found answers or decided there weren't any.

"That's why I'm counting on you guys so much," he answered. Added a wink to it and let them interpret that any way they wanted to. God, it was the worst plan he'd ever had.

* * *

><p>Late, far later than it should have been, but he wouldn't have been able to sleep very well, anyway. Not with the General acting all out of sorts and the crowd of people that'd be here tomorrow just to see Bo pull a stunt the likes of which they'd never seen before.<p>

The black and white stripes of the ramp had called to him, made him come back out of the comfort of the RV and Diane's arms to stare at it. To think about the height and angle, to let that red line up the middle of it taunt him with how he'd not yet driven all the way up and off the end of the ramp. And he was running out of time to test it out before the real jump.

"I need to make another practice run," he'd told the woman who had come out to stand beside him, to woo him back inside where she had made promises of dinner and champagne and romance.

For a flurry of seconds he would have sworn there was a tension in her body, that same kind he'd felt in other girls when they didn't like what he was suggesting, but by the time he looked down at her face, she was smiling in that same indulgent way she had ever since he'd agreed to make the jump in the first place. Then she'd called Carl over to get a few of the guys to stop building the ring of fire and check the ramp for him.

He'd just stared at all that black, white and red and waited until he'd gotten the go ahead. Then he'd strapped himself in, revved the General's engine and put his foot down.

At first it felt good, it felt right. Mostly, anyway. The car felt different without the dead weight of Luke in the passenger seat, always had. Even if it wasn't logical, even if his cousin would laugh at the notion if Bo ever told him. (But Bo wouldn't be telling him much of anything, he didn't figure, other than 'Merry Christmas' when he called home from traveling the carnival circuit; they'd probably be in Florida come that time of year.) Took him a second to accept that absence of weight and compensate for it, then he evened out and aimed for that red stripe up the middle of the ramp. Felt the power of the car around him, felt it drop out from under him, felt the skid as he slammed on the brakes. Not fast enough, he hung the undercarriage up on the end of the ramp, but at least he hadn't gone off the end, headlamps over hubcaps.

And he'd promised Diane that he'd talk his car into behaving if it took him all night, accepted her kiss, then set to work.

It had gotten dark outside of the ring of light thrown by the lamp clipped to the General's open hood, and then it had gotten quiet as the rest of the Carnival hands settled into their various digs for the night. Just him and a fussy car that wouldn't give him any hint about where it was ailing, plus a cricket or two hiding in the grass near his feet. No too-smart and bossy cousin stretched out over the engine, pulling on this and that, helping him solve his problems like Luke always had. Too late, even if he'd been willing to, to call the farm – by now Jesse ought to be asleep while Daisy pretended not to doze off over her sewing and Luke read until he got sick of those snores coming from Daisy's corner, shook her awake and sent her to bed before heading off himself. Cooter would be out carousing and smiling at all the girls that Bo wasn't there to steal out from under his nose, and he was on his own until morning. Just staring at the innards of an engine he knew like he knew his own face, and there was nothing wrong as far as he could see. Except the car wouldn't give him the power he needed to do the jump.

* * *

><p>"Enos," he said, and it was pathetic. It was begging and it was shameful, but the light outside was the thick and drippy gray of dawn. He hadn't slept, and it had been an endless night with only a lousy plan to keep him company (for the first half of the night, that was, and since then he'd had entirely too much company for his tastes, thank you very much).<p>

"Now, Luke," was the same old protest he'd heard from the guy ever since he'd become a deputy. _I've got responsibilities now_ went the gist of it. And admittedly, he did, but they weren't new, just different. Enos' life as the son of a moonshiner had been filled with duty, too, and Luke aimed to remind him of that. It was a stupid idea, but then he'd had so many of those lately that it was hard to single any one of them out and call it stupider than the others.

"Enos, it'll only take a minute. Just a trip over to the fairgrounds, a few seconds to talk to Bo, and you can be back here like you never left."

Those wrinkles on the deputy's forehead called into question this nonsense about it only taking a minute, when driving over to the fairgrounds alone would take five, and that was if he went with lights and sirens and full speed.

"I don't think Mr. Hogg would want me to do that," the deputy settled on, finally.

Which was just ridiculous, and if that was the only objection, Luke could work his way through that in no time at all.

"He's still in bed, Enos." Because the County Commissioner's moonshine-running days were mostly in the past, and if he did make the occasional sale, he got some other poor fool to do his driving for him while he laid innocently on his double-soft, exorbitantly expensive mattress until well after sunrise, ready to disavow all knowledge of any illegal activity. "He ain't never gonna know."

"Well, I don't know, Luke."

All this hemming and hawing, and eventually it would get to be too late. Because despite the flurry of late night activity, Rosco was due to show up for duty in a couple of hours and Boss would eventually tire of sleeping and eating his morning away, and then he'd come in to the office to do his third favorite thing: counting money. Luke had limited time to work with.

"Enos, he's all I got. You know us Dukes ain't got nothing but each other and with Jesse and Daisy out of town…" pause there, to think about it. To weigh his pride against his need, to consider the kind of thing that Dukes would never say to lawmen. But _I'd be much obliged if you'd help me out_ hadn't worked and Enos had been a friend long before he'd made any vows of loyalty to Hazzard County. Luke swallowed hard against the objections that his brain threw up at him about how a Duke never begged for help from the law and, "Please, Enos," he finally eked out. "I'll be a model prisoner while you're gone."

Because that was the crux of it. Along with trying to talk through all of Enos' mixed loyalties, he was also talking through bars. And those metal stripes between him and the equally tired deputy on the other side made it all the less likely that Enos would listen to him.

It was a lousy, terrible plan. It had never been anything but, and he knew that. Still, it wasn't complete yet and wouldn't be until he managed to enlist someone, anyone, to help him out with the last step. It was supposed to be Cooter that did the honors, but repeated attempts to use his one phone call on the mechanic had led to endless ringing and no answer. Seemed like the fool was up to his old antics, drinking the night away somewhere, before sleeping it off under a bush. This had put a kink in his plan, which, despite being awful, had gone off pretty much like clockwork until now.

He'd waved as Jesse and Daisy drove out into the heavy darkness of last night, knowing they'd heed his reminders. Stay as long as it takes to discover anything useful (and since Luke didn't figure there was anything useful to find, he expected them to follow the second part of his instructions), but whatever you do, don't get back any later than one o'clock. Which had left him with a good sixteen hours to pull his own fool stunt.

Somewhere after midnight, he'd taken Sweet Tilly for a little ride up to the still site. That part he'd done carefully, under the cloak of all the tricks he'd learned over his years of being a good delivery boy. Then he'd loaded a good half dozen full jugs right into the car's back seat without bothering to hide them and set off in search of a blue Plymouth.

It would have helped if he'd had any knowledge the revenuer, he reckoned. Each had their own habits and he could have located any one of the other agents that had worked this territory over the past couple of years without a lot of effort. Andy Roach would have been down by the half-collapsed old cobbler's shack, hiding in the trees with his CB tuned to the police band, waiting for any chatter about black cars moving at high speed. Harvey Essex would have been closer to town, sitting in some parking lot or other, scratching in his log book, and Buchanan would have been prowling around the lowlands. Roxanne Huntley, well she would have been the easiest to find, out dancing with Bo at The Boar's Nest, but she was gone; they had all been driven out of Hazzard one way or another, and near as he had been able to figure the town had gotten itself a new revenuer who was halfway absentee.

He had driven around for a while, in loops on back roads then back down to the sugar sand at the bottom of Possum Hollow Road in case the poor revenuer was still stuck there. Nothing there but the traces of ruts from where he'd been stuck, then another pair that had to belong to Cooter's wrecker. No revenue agent in sight.

Made his task harder, but Luke was nothing if not dogged in following his own stupid plan. He went back up to the high roads in the west, south to the swamp, east and down into the canyon. No one anywhere, so he'd headed towards town and that was where it had started to get embarrassing.

Still no revenuer, but he'd skimmed past a speed trap without thought, and Enos had popped out of the bushes like a jack-in-the-box, on his tail in seconds. He'd mentally kicked himself for that little indiscretion, then taken off with a piercing siren trailing behind him as Enos struggled to keep up. Considered losing the deputy all together but then he figured that the white car behind him could serve as a beacon to the federal agent, who was clearly lollygagging somewhere else.

A while later, somewhere in the vicinity of Snake Nation Road, Sheriff Coltrane had joined the chase. Probably got a chattering and excited call from Enos over the CB about how he was in pursuit of one suspicious and fleeing back matte Ford and took a minute to curse his deputy for a fool for waking him up (and, undoubtedly his mama too) by breaking the standard late-night radio silence. But there was a reason that old Rosco kept the CB radio by his bedside on at all hours, and that was because he couldn't stand to miss a single chase. So he'd probably put on some semblance of his uniform over those long pajamas he was known to wear, and run out to his cruiser to follow along in hot pursuit, too.

Luke had kept right on running, because somewhere out here there had to be a revenuer and that was who he really wanted to find. But after an hour or so of doing laps, he started to wonder just how much gas there was in the Hazzard Law's tank and whether even they would be forced to abandon him soon. Then he got tired, and he figured that beggars couldn't be choosers. As humiliating as it was, he'd have to change the plan. So he slowed a little, stopped pulling all those evasive maneuvers that he'd been using in for all of his years as a moonshine runner, and let Enos get in front of him. Took a few tries to help the deputy do it, and then he let himself be boxed in. Heard that voice echoing behind him through the bullhorn, about how Rosco had him now, and he'd just better stay put and keep his hands in plain sight. After that it was the feel of cold metal on his wrists – no prayer of talking Enos out of using the handcuffs this time – and his rights being shouted at him.

"What's the charge?" he'd mumbled, halfway out of habit.

"Reckless driving," Rosco had answered back, proud as a peacock and dumb as an ox. Leaving Luke to just about point him towards the moonshine, and from there it had been spitting and sputtering, a series of ijits and I'm-serious-this-times, and then it had been the humiliating ride back to town in the back of the Sheriff's cruiser, poor Tilly dragged behind in utter indignity.

It might not have been exactly the way he'd planned it, but it worked well enough. He'd been a good boy, staying in the cell they locked him into, sitting on his cot and watching Enos drift off in the chair on the other side of the bars. Rosco had gone back home for the night just crowing about the fine arrest he'd made, and how those boys down in Atlanta would have to sit up and take notice of him now. He'd just, he'd call them first thing in the morning and get them to come up here and see for themselves how a sheriff could catch those moonshining Dukes better than any revenuer ever had and then he'd—

And the door had clicked as Rosco made his way out of the jail, probably still muttering congratulations to himself all the way to his car and back home to bed.

Hours, for hours he'd been on his best behavior, even though he knew. His time was limited, but there'd been no point in jumping the gun. The middle of the night was too early to go getting other folks involved so he'd sat there and let it sink in. How it was, just as it always had been, a lousy plan. One that was going to get him sent to prison.

And it would only be worth it if he could get someone, anyone, to go and get Bo for him now. Dawn was breaking and it was time for the next part of the scheme to get underway.

"I promise, Enos, no tricks," he swore now. "If I knew the number to Diane's trailer I'd call him myself. But he ain't never told me," and Luke, idiot that he was, hadn't ever swallowed his pride enough to ask, "what it was."

A sigh, a tilt of the Deputy's head. Maybe he was remembering a childhood spent running over the same fields together, Luke and Bo stopping every now and again to help a clumsy Enos back to his feet after he'd tripped in another gopher hole. Maybe he was thinking about the fiery way the sun shone through Daisy's hair, reflecting on how much he liked her smile and the way he'd never see it again if he didn't help Luke now. Maybe he was just as tired as Luke was and maybe he just wanted the begging to stop.

"I reckon," the deputy said, fussing with his own fingers and coming to stand closer to the cell. Looking right at Luke, trying to figure out if he was telling the truth or whether he'd be worrying at the bars the minute the deputy left him alone, somehow trying to work them loose. "I mean, I usually go and check on my folks in the morning." And get himself a decent breakfast, too, Luke suspected. There was only so much a man could cook on a camp stove in the tiny rented room of a boarding house. "I suppose I could stop at the fairgrounds on the way there."

Luke let out the breath he'd been holding – on and off – since the time this lousy plan had come into his mind.

"Thank you, Enos. Make sure you mention that Daisy and Jesse ain't nowhere to be found, and that Rosco's gonna call in the feds this morning."

"All right," his friend answered in that sad little voice that knew. Luke would be off to prison soon enough and while it had been fun to play wild chasing games of catch-me-if-you-can over the years, it wasn't e real pleasure to win them if it meant a good friend getting shipped off to the big house. And Luke really hadn't meant to put Enos into that position.

"Hey," he asked as the deputy pulled his jacket over that thin cotton shirt he wore, getting ready to go out and face the morning chill. "What happened to the revenue agent, Enos?"

"What revenue agent?"

"The one in the blue Plymouth." The one that was supposed to catch me instead of you.

"Luke, Hazzard ain't got no revenuer assigned to it, not since Buchanan left last month. I reckon they'll get around to sending a new one up here soon enough," Enos answered. "Don't rightly know whether he'll drive a blue Plymouth, though."

He snorted—the whole situation was just too stupid for him not to laugh a little—and waved good bye as his lifelong friend went off in search of his cousin. To pull him away from the girl he claimed to love by citing the sort of family emergency that even Bo couldn't ignore.

He hoped.


	14. Taking Orders from Idiots

**Chapter Fourteen - Taking Orders from Idiots**

It had been, he reflected, a long night. Mostly sleepless and Jesse would whip his tail for that if he knew: _boy, you need to get enough rest before you go off jumping cars over other cars_. His uncle never had been a big fan for the sort of vertical feats that Bo achieved, he was much more of a horizontal driver himself. So Bo could forgive the old man, sort of, for siding with Luke in calling the Leap for Life a fool stunt. It was Luke that ought to know better, who had experience with what a car could do and what Bo could do with a car, and should have trusted him.

But he hadn't and neither Bo's uncle nor his cousin was here to tell him how he should have slept. Instead, there was Diane, offering him kisses and praise because the General was in fine working order, or he was about to be. Bo had spent most of the night tinkering with this or that and never being wholly satisfied with his results, so in the end he'd made a run over to Cooter's farmhouse in the hours before dawn, thrown rocks at the mechanic's window until the man had woken up and cursed him a few times for the disruption, then followed him back to the fairgrounds to pull every plug, tug on every wire and check every connection in the Charger's engine until he ran smooth again.

It had been a long night and Cooter had things well in hand, which was why Bo left him to it, then came back to Diane's RV (which he wasn't quite ready to call "home" but he figured that pretty soon he would be) to get a shower. The sun had crested the horizon and he wouldn't be getting any sleep anytime soon. Diane was there in the kitchen when he emerged, his wet hair in those uncombed curls that he'd never let anyone but his family see before. She wasn't cooking; there'd be no farm breakfast here. No need for it when the carnival would be cranking up soon and there'd be all manner of food being prepared in all those little stands sprinkled around the fairgrounds and, as the star of the show, he could have as much of it as he wanted.

Which left him all the more time to slip his arms around his girl as she puttered around the sink, washing glasses from yesterday's champagne in anticipation of—

"You all set for your big day?" she asked, turning in his arms to face him.

—another toast after the jump was done.

"Diane," he answered, looking into those soft blue eyes that adored every move he made. "I had my big day when I met you."

"I hope you mean that, Bo, because I feel the same way about you."

Nothing to do then but to touch her face, to use his fingers to angle it just right for the kiss he gave her. Just a quiet little thing, a press of lips. It was only when her arms came around his bare back that he let it deepen and get more serious.

Just about got to the point where he figured this would work better if they were prone, when an echoing metallic bang set up on the door to the RV. Abrupt end to the kiss and Diane shoved him back.

"Carl," she hollered, heading toward the noise. "Didn't I tell you just to handle whatever—oh, hello officer," came out in a much more civil tone, laced with cool formality, as she swung the door open. "What can I do for you?"

"Excuse me, ma'am." That sounded an awful lot like Enos. "Is Bo here?" Enos, being earnest and nervous and talking too fast.

"Hi Enos," he answered back, taking a step closer to the door so the deputy could see him. He was still shirtless with his hair in a wreck, but old Enos sounded upset and Bo didn't figure that excusing himself to gussy up was appropriate just now. "Anything wrong?"

"You aren't here to arrest him again," Diane said, icily. "Are you? Because Carl already paid his bail and the impound fee, so if you and Mr. Hogg have some sort of a—"

"No, Ma'am," Enos interrupted, painfully politely. Like it actually distressed him to have to stop the sweet lady from talking now, but he really did have something he needed to say. "Bo, Luke sent me to fetch you."

Oh, that could not be good. Luke was barely on speaking terms with him right now. To send Enos out here in search of him had to mean—"Did something happen to Jesse or Daisy?" he asked, taking the small step that would put him next to Diane and closer to Enos.

"No, Bo, they're fine," the deputy answered, squinting up at him from where he stood on the tiny metal steps. Bo put his hand on the open door, holding it so that Diane wouldn't have to anymore. The motion kind of squeezed her over to the side so he could get right up close to his old friend, who had taken off his hat and was using a finger to fiddle with the tassel. "At least I think they are. It's Luke that's in trouble."

"Luke," Diane said, and she probably had some other choice words to add about his cousin, but she didn't need to waste her breath. Bo could say them for her.

"Luke don't need my help." He was, after all, too smart for anything Bo could offer him. At least that's what he always implied, all those times he'd compared Bo's brain to various vegetables or straight up called him an idiot. "He can take care of himself. And if he can't, Jesse and Daisy can help him out." That was how this little family divorce had worked out, wasn't it? Luke got their kin and the house they'd grown up in, and Bo got Diane and the General. It was about as fair as it could be, considering.

"Well Bo, I reckon you'd be right if Jesse and Daisy was here, but they ain't. And old Luke, he couldn't make his one phone call, 'cuz they's out of town and Cooter didn't answer, and he didn't have the phone number for here," because he'd never asked for it or Bo had never given it to him and what was that part about one phone call?

"Wait," Bo interrupted, making Enos twiddle the tassles on his hat even more vigorously. "Is Luke in jail again?"

"Bo," Diane was saying, trying to calm him down or get him to focus on her. And he would, in just a minute, as soon as he knew what Luke had gone and done this time.

"Yes, Bo, he is, and the Sheriff says he's going to call in the federal agents to come get him just as soon as the office in Atlanta opens later this morning."

"Federal agents?" Diane was saying, but Bo wasn't paying her any mind.

"What's the charge, Enos?" But he already knew.

"Luke's been arrested for transporting illegal intoxicants," the deputy answered. Then, in case Bo had trouble interpreting legalese (oh, but he didn't, never had), "Moonshining."

* * *

><p>He'd been here before, sitting in this very cell, not twenty-four hours ago. Waiting on his kin and biding his time, but back then he'd had his righteous anger to keep him company. All he had now were his thoughts.<p>

About things he'd done wrong and there were so many that he could take them one-by-one the whole day and he'd never get to them all. Like how he ought to have listened to Daisy when she told him to apologize to Bo about Roxanne Huntley and all the snide things he'd said after. How he'd never really made it up to his cousin like he should have after nearly taking his head off for letting that girl mechanic talk him into putting the General Lee up in a bet against Amy Creavy's Lucifer. That he'd made a promise to not compete with Bo over girls, but he hadn't been particularly good about keeping it. The way he'd so wholly blamed Bo when Jesse got a hankering to race again, then embarrassed him in front of Cale Yarborough and left him on his own when he went into the wilderness after those car-stripping girls. It had been one mistake after another, but nothing came close to the last few days. Diane was using Bo, Luke hadn't wavered on that. He just figured he'd given the boy every reason in the world to run off with her instead of staying in a farmhouse with a cousin that called him stupid at every turn.

_Things go wrong sometimes, Luke,_ his uncle had informed him on one particularly temper-strewn day of his childhood. _And when they do, you got to decide whether its more important to pitch a fit, or to fix them._ Up until now, he'd gone the route of stamping his angry little foot and announcing what a moron his cousin was. This right here, the bars around him and the dank smell of defeat, was what happened when you waited until too late to start the fixing part.

The main thing, he'd decided during last night's chores, was keeping Bo alive. Because there was something fishy about that crash in Cedar City, and just because Luke didn't know what it was didn't mean it wasn't a fact. But he didn't have evidence (and he doubted that there was any to be found a week later) and there was no chance, after all the ways Luke had driven him away, that Bo would listen to just words.

So he'd sent Jesse and Daisy on what he figured was a wild goose chase, because he needed them out of the way. Then he'd gone ahead and ensured that he'd spend a few years in prison. But if he knew Bo, and he'd really like to believe he did, this whole fiasco ought to keep the boy from making the jump.

He hoped. Because if things didn't work the way he'd planned, there was no one left to get to Bo.

It was only the pain in his hand that made him realize that he'd slapped the bars in front of him. When he'd made this plan he'd accounted for as many things as possible. Like making sure there'd be no interference from his uncle, like carrying only a small amount of 'shine in hopes that it would keep his prison sentence to a minimum, but also making sure his bail would be too much for Bo to pay for out of his earnings if he made the jump. What he hadn't planned for was the way he'd be pacing now, running his fingers through his hair, smacking the unforgiving bars of the cell. Because it was done, he'd controlled everything he could and now it was other people's hands (and within his cousin's conscience) to see the plan the rest of the way through.

And it wasn't going to work. Bo was going to shrug his shoulders when Enos told him, he was going to say that with all the money he was making he could hire farmhands to replace both himself and Luke, he was going to make the jump anyway. And by the time Jesse got back to town, he was going to have one dead nephew and one on the way to prison.

Somewhere overhead there were chairs scraping and feet walking. The morning getting started in the courthouse and soon enough Boss would learn that basement contained one caged Duke and get all excited about it. Luke's bail would get set somewhere in the thousands; he was a moron and he was—

No longer alone.

* * *

><p>Popcorn. That was the thing, through the whirl of his thoughts, that he could concentrate on. Somewhere popcorn was cooking and it smelled like every movie he'd ever been to. Made him picture Burt Reynolds with his mustache and his swagger, and the way he would have known what to do. Bo, well he wasn't in a movie and he didn't have a script or even a mustache. Which made everything much more difficult.<p>

"Bo," Diane was trying to reason with him, but he could hardly hear her. White noise in his brain and it drowned out most of her logic about how there wasn't really much of anything he could do about Luke and he didn't need any distractions right now anyway, not when he ought to be concentrating on the jump he had to make in only a few hours.

"Where the heck are Jesse and Daisy?" he mumbled again, but Enos hadn't been able to tell him, and Diane had already become exasperated by the question.

His shirt, he needed a shirt. A shirtless man couldn't think straight. Seemed like he had proved that to himself a few times over, and still here he was, caught without a shirt again.

"Bo," Diane said to him again, and it was quiet. Gentle, not frustrated, not any of the things her tone had been ever since Enos had knocked on the door. Her hands on his arms stopped him from the pointless laps he'd been doing around her tiny bedroom in search of errant clothing. A rub of a soft palm against his bare skin, and then her arms were around his neck, hugging him, her body curling into his. He felt the warmth there, the sweetness, felt the kiss on his jaw. Felt the offer of calm respite and he welcomed it. Closed his eyes, wrapped his arms around her back, and let himself relax. Tiny fingers tangling in the hair at the nape of his neck and he moved on instinct, let her tip her head back and kiss him for real this time. His hands slid down the curvature of her spine, finding the narrowness of her tiny waist.

Used his grip there to push her back, to separate their bodies and reach for his shirt on the back of her door, where he'd just remembered hanging it before stepping into the shower. Turned around so he could pull it onto one arm and then the other without accidentally punching Diane or a wall, then started buttoning it up.

"Bo," she complained to his back. "All you've had to say about him for days is that he doesn't show you enough respect and he doesn't believe in you. You're not going to go running off to help him now when all he's been doing is hurting you, are you?"

Boots. They were, out of farm-boy habit, by the door to the outside. He headed over to put them on, could feel the way his girlfriend followed right behind.

"Diane," he grunted as he bent down to tug on his left boot, "Luke's a jackass," then his right. "But he's family," and he would never have sent Enos out here in search of Bo if he'd had any other choice. Luke's pride was oversized, a dangerous thing to swallow unless he was willing to choke on it. "I'll be back, but," he said, kicking to seat the boot solidly on his right foot, then turning to kiss her again. Quick peck on the lips, because, "Right now, I've got to go." To find out precisely what kind of trouble the jackass had stirred up.

Out the door and he skipped the steps that always had been too tiny for his feet anyway, leaping straight to the ground. He could hear the banging as the last of the stunt apparatus was being set up over by the track, he could smell the funnel cake and cotton candy heating up in the booths that lined the grass just fifty feet from where he was sliding into the General's window, and somewhere beyond that was the smell of gasoline and motor oil. The chrome of thirty-two stacked cars gleamed and winked at him in the morning sun as he turned the key and the General's engine, perfectly tuned by a now-absent Cooter (who Bo could just catch sight of, over there at the hotdog stand and—the man had no idea what a proper breakfast food was) and put his foot down on the accelerator, waving out the window at the woman he was leaving behind.

Jesse, he thought as his tires screeched against the pavement and Diane's RV became a tiny speck in the rearview mirror. Where the heck was Jesse? As far as Bo knew, no one had taken sick. Not that there was much of anyone left to take sick, but Daisy's Aunt Kate still lived up in the Tennessee hills and if she was ill—

If she was ill, Jesse would have come and told him so, Bo was sure of it. Because even if she was only Daisy's aunt from her mother's side and not technically of the same blood as Bo, she was still family. So where the heck was Jesse? And Daisy?

The trees on either side of the road were nothing but blurs now, the pavement a stripe out ahead of him. Easy to move at this speed where the car made all the decisions for him and all he had to do was keep his foot down. Which left a lot of room in his brain for thinking.

Why would Luke be making a whiskey run when Jesse was out of town? Not that it couldn't be done, just that it never had been. Heck, they didn't even make runs when their uncle was off at another farm, midwifing a calf. Habit had the Duke boys out on the road while the man who had raised them sat home by the CB, just in case he was needed. Sure, without Bo at home Luke would have been the only one inside of Tilly, but he shouldn't have been making a run entirely alone. Jesse should have been just one distressed broadcast away.

And Daisy. Why, when Enos went looking for a Duke family member to call on, hadn't she been fussing over the stove and that old pilot light that went out and had to be relit most mornings before she could cook breakfast?

(And thinking of Enos, seemed he suddenly had himself a tail. White one with lights on the top and a screaming siren. Had to be the deputy, who had walked away from Diane's RV after imparting his unpleasant information. Could this all have been a trap? Sending Bo careening into town at illegal speeds so the deputy could hide in some bushes and catch him in the act? Maybe kick out another taillight and confiscate the General again? Enos was too honest for something like that wasn't he?)

He might have been a fool. Probably was, because there he was, driving around the town square and headed straight for the police station with a deputy on his tail, something no self-respecting moonshine runner ought ever do. And it might just be a trap, one laid out and set by his own cousin, but he didn't want to believe Luke would do that to him. Not again; he'd already done something like it once, and it had been one more provocation in their lock-step march towards coming to blows. Luke didn't like the feeling of a fist crashing into his chin (unless he did, seemed like his cousin had involved himself in plenty of barroom brawls over the years) so he wouldn't do it again. Bo set his mind to believing that, slammed his foot onto the brake pedal and skidded to a diagonal stop in front of the courthouse. Almost forgot to kill the engine before pulling himself out the window, heard the screech of tires behind him and sent up a quick prayer that the clumsy Enos wouldn't smack into his back bumper, at least not until he'd pulled himself all the way out of the window and gotten a safe distance away. There was no crash so he didn't look back, just took the steps two at a time and slammed his way into the main hall. Turned right, through the swinging doors and there was Rosco, rumpled and only halfway awake, standing in front of his own desk and looking like morning had come too soon. Didn't even offer an _ijit_ of greeting.

"Where's Luke?" he demanded, got a blank look in response. Damn it all, if this was a trap—

If this was a trap, he'd already walked right into it, face first. There was Enos coming in behind him, shouting something or other, while Rosco shook himself awake and blurted a nonsensical response. Bo ignored them both and marched toward the stairs, because if this was a trap he might just as well keep going until he was all the way inside and it snapped closed around him.

Luke was a schemer. Always had been and often enough his little plots had gotten them into the sort of trouble that ended in a sore backside and extra chores. Luke schemed to get what he wanted, he schemed to keep their livelihood a secret from the feds, he schemed to keep the duly constituted law of this county from taking advantage of the people. He schemed to win races, he schemed to woo girls, he schemed to get extra sausages at breakfast.

But most of all, Luke schemed to take care of his family.

"Bo Duke," Rosco was hollering behind him, but he was halfway down the steps to the cells by then. "Halt! You just halt in the name of the law." Seemed a pointless order, what with how he was already turning that final corner and shoving at that metal gate that was meant to separate the jail from the upstairs, but never got more than halfway closed anyway. Stomping set up behind him as the lawmen finally figured out that they would have to pursue him if they really wanted him to stop, and he looked out toward the cells.

There was Luke, blue shirt wrinkled on his chest, only halfway tucked in and that was a bad sign. A terrible sign really, because the first thing his cousin did after crawling out of a wrecked car with its wheels in the air was to tuck in that shirt. Hands on his hips like maybe he expected a fight, but his face had a gray cast and his eyes looked like he'd taken some of Daisy's makeup and colored the bags underneath them purple. He looked tired and tense and that was the best of it.

Bo marched forward despite the way Luke squared himself off, planting his feet like maybe he was expecting another tooth-jarring punch from his younger cousin. Rosco and Enos were still tangled up somewhere behind him as he walked right up to the bars and reached a hand through. Took hold of the back of his cousin's neck and pulled forward against the automatic resistance there. He had all the leverage to Luke's none, wasn't half as tired or beaten looking as his cousin, so Bo won the struggle. Kept on pulling, steady pressure, even after Luke had taken that step closer to the bars. Leaned closer himself until their foreheads met, warmth of skin on skin with the chill of metal at each temple, and they just stood there. Nothing more than that, some sort of quiet communion between them.

"Bo Duke," still coming from the stairwell in the sheriff's screaming voice. "That's a federal prisoner, you ain't got no right—" got interrupted by some sort of excited chatter of Enos' about phone calls and right to representation.

Bo closed his eyes, let himself rest there a moment longer against Luke, felt the give when his cousin let go of the pretense of fighting against being this close. It was true, then. Luke was facing down a federal charge of running moonshine, probably as good as in prison right now. Maybe Bo halfway wished this had all been a sneaky trick to get the General impounded again after all.

"You're an idiot, you know," he informed his cousin.

Little exhale that might have been a wry laugh and Bo opened his eyes and moved his head back. Kept his hand where it was, holding Luke firm so he could get a good look at him. Hair in tangles and mats where he'd been running his hands through it, cheeks hollow, and those eyes. Shimmery, too blue, a little lost.

"I know," came the quiet answer, then Luke's eyes cleared. His head turned toward the cacophony of Enos and Rosco finally stumbling their way to the bottom of the stairs, just about tangled up in each other's legs. All manner of protests being lodged about rights and prisoners and, "Bo," Luke said quietly.

But he didn't have time for any of the people that were trying to tell him things. He stepped back from the bars, let go of Luke and, "I'm going to get you out," he swore. Pushed past the lawmen that were advancing on him anyway (thought he probably ought to thank Enos later, because he reckoned the deputy had deliberately run a certain amount of interference to give him time to talk to Luke), and ran up the steps.

"Bo," he heard behind him, and then some other words from Luke that got shouted down by Rosco. Which was fine. The whole bunch of them in that basement were idiots, and Bo was about dang tired of taking orders from the likes of idiots anyway.


	15. Worse Than a Bad Plan

**_Author's note:_** _Putting this chapter up quick because the circumstances of the coming week might make the next one slow, so it'll all come out even in the end, right?_

_Nope, no answers in this one, either. Just more questions and problems (see title). Don't blame me; it's the boys' fault._

_Thanks again for joining me on this little trip!_

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter Fifteen - Worse Than a Bad Plan<strong>

"You're an idiot," Bo had said, and Lord, he knew it was true. Knew it a little more with each passing minute, and he'd thought he'd done all the knowing he could do on the subject before the sun even rose. Turned out he had a lot more knowing to do.

His plan had come this far—to the point of no return and then that much further—only to stumble and fall. To come crashing back to earth like a car after an off-balance jump.

Because Bo had run out of here (and Luke should have known he was going to, impulsive as he'd always been) without learning what his own role was. Without staying long enough to get instructions, only long enough to get upset, to look overwrought. To figure that he had to do something, but it was going to be the wrong thing. Luke could feel it like a fever, burning him up from the inside out.

"Enos!" he hollered, but it was too late for that. The law of this county had gone stumbling and bumbling up the stairs after Bo, like a two-headed, blue monster. Yelling at him about this and that, nonsense about how he'd best not set his foot on the premises again (that had been the sheriff-head) and something about speeding (which had come from the deputy-head).

Bail, as far as he knew, had not been set. For all of Rosco's blustering about the feds, they hadn't been called in yet. Couldn't have been, Enos had said the sheriff would do it as soon as the office up in Atlanta opened. It might be past nine now—the angle of the sun through the bars in the next cell seemed to indicate that it was a possibility—but there hadn't been time for a phone call to be made. Not when Bo had come bursting in just moments after Luke heard the first sounds of the office above him opening, there was no smell of coffee coming from upstairs and no way Rosco would go contacting anyone until he'd had his first cup.

So there was no bail and there Bo went, promising to get him out. Which meant raising an unknown amount of money and how was Bo going to do that? There was always robbing the bank; they'd been accused of it enough times that it might just as well be true, but then again, Bo was a good boy. A Duke, and Dukes just didn't do that kind of thing, even when they were desperate. There was going door to door around the town and begging. Dukes had their pride, but they also had loyalty to family, and they weren't above accepting the help of friends and neighbors. Then again, no one in town (save Boss Hogg) had enough money to throw into any kind of a pot that Bo could find (and his cousin was strong, but he probably couldn't lug around a big enough container for all the pennies and nickels that were all most people could spare anyway). There was panning the creeks and streams for precious metals, but the gold rush of a hundred fifty years ago had wiped most of that out.

"Enos," he hollered again, because there was only one thing, really, that Bo could do. One talent he had that people were willing to pay to see, and everyone in town had been throwing money into that particular pot all week. "Enos!" But it was pointless. The deputy was probably out there right now, buying his own ticket.

Because Luke had been sloppy, he'd been tired and maybe it had just felt good to have Bo willing to be that close to him again. Maybe he'd expected his cousin to yell at him some more, to try to take a swing at him despite the bars between them. And maybe he'd spent some part of the endless night planning how he'd counteract that, anticipating that the need to win the argument would keep Bo around long enough to hear him out, to understand what he had to do even if he didn't much like it. And for those first seconds when his cousin had come slamming through that gate at the bottom of the stairs it had looked like everything Luke expected, but then there'd been that other thing. Where Bo reached out to him, and instead of pushing him back, pulled him closer, offering silent comfort.

Comfort Luke didn't deserve and shouldn't have accepted, but he'd been worn out, utterly exhausted from staying up all night kicking himself, and he'd let himself rest there for a few seconds. Because it was nostalgic, because it was a moment of normalcy blossoming right up out of all the stupidity that had been surrounding them, because he wanted to.

He'd wasted time when he should have been talking, and that had all but assured that Bo would get himself killed now. Because the one thing that would earn him money (not enough money, though Bo didn't know that because bail hadn't been set yet but when it was, it would be too high) would be to go back out there and demand more of the take for pulling his car-jumping stunt. The one that Luke had been trying to stop him from with all of this foolishness, and it had all turned around on him. Because now Bo was upset, he was distraught, and he was going to attempt the Leap for Life anyway, in that agitated state.

Luke kicked the cot leg, felt the pain ricochet up from his toe. Hobbled away, to the front of the cell and looked longingly at the set of empty hooks where Rosco had been known to hang the spare set of keys, but they weren't there this morning. Went back to the cot, sat down, scrubbed his hands through his matted hair. Bowed his head and tried to concentrate well enough to pray, because that was about the only thing he had left to try.

He didn't sleep, he'd swear to that on as many Bibles as the town could round up. And yet, somehow, the sun was at an entirely different angle when he next looked up. Started, leapt to his feet, because there was noise. A lot of it, and it was mostly of the ijit and wijit variety, but there were also thumping footsteps, uneven, like someone being shoved down the stairs.

And there, suddenly, was Bo, handcuff on his right wrist with the other end flapping around loosely as he snatched his hand away from where Rosco was grabbing at him.

* * *

><p>A man—no, not just a man, a Duke—shouldn't have to work half that hard to get himself put into a jail cell. Shouldn't have to just about cuff his own wrists and drag himself down into the basement of the courthouse like a confused dog tugging on its own leash.<p>

But he had, he'd done all the work of getting himself down here (still hadn't read himself his rights, but those could wait or he and Luke could recite them to each other since they knew them so well), and now it was time to get locked up. That was the way it worked, they got down to the bottom of the stairs, Rosco fidgeted with his keys, chose a cell and shoved both Duke boys into the same one.

"What the hell," Luke was saying, and in was distracting. One more thing for Rosco to think about and the poor man's brain wasn't halfway working to begin with. "Is he doing here?" Sounded angry, sounded oddly like the same man who had been yelling at him all week about his lack of brains when it came to attractive and flattering girls. Made Bo wonder why he'd gone to all the trouble he had to get himself down here.

"You hush!" a flustered Rosco commanded and Bo couldn't have said it better himself. Luke needed to be quiet because Bo could handle him that way. Could remember that he not only loved him, but most of the time he actually liked him, too. "You," got repeated, because the sheriff never could settle for saying things just once. Had to form his mouth around them a few times before he could be satisfied, but Bo was just about done listening to all that hemming and hawing. "Hush." Any more of it and he couldn't swear that his temper would hold.

"Rosco," he snapped, shaking his arm just enough to make the chain that dangled off his wrist jingle a little bit. _Remember,_ that gesture said, _I'm under arrest._

"He's my prisoner," the sheriff finally burst out with, jaw jutted. "He's my prisoner and I've arrested him and you just hush," he reminded Luke.

Bo figured this nonsense conversation could go on all day. If he let it, but he wasn't in any mood to put up with either of the other two men down here in the drafty jail with him, so he reached for the keys on Rosco's belt. Because sometimes a man had to take matters into his own hands.

If he could, if his knuckles didn't get slapped first. Silly little swat like he'd gotten from many a girl for reaching for some tender part of her too quickly, before he'd kissed her enough that she was ready.

"Ijit," Rosco informed him, and he figured that was just fine, because now the sheriff had hold of his own keys. "Don't you go touching my," and the sentence ended there because the man had a one-track brain. He could either talk or he could think, and just about every word that had ever come out of his mouth proved he couldn't manage both at the same time. So talking had to stop because the man was sorting through the keys on his chain, looking at this one and that like he was trying to decide something.

Hard to say how many times he and Luke had been arrested and how many hours they'd spent in this same dank and dark corner of the county. Not enough, not half of what they should for all the illegal things they'd never been caught doing before, and yet, too many. And for all those times they'd been locked up, it was always together, two Duke boys in one cell. Until yesterday, that was, when they'd been arrested separately and then caged separately and it had seemed all right at the time, he reckoned. He hadn't wanted to be too close to Luke right then. If he had any smarts he probably wouldn't want to be too close to his cousin now, whose mouth was opening again to demand—

"On what charges?"

—but he did, he wanted to be near Luke. Wanted to be close enough to touch, because prison loomed. Prison was an inevitability and there wouldn't be any reprieve from that. Sure there'd be some manner of a trial, and maybe there'd be bail, but in the end there was still prison and he didn't know what that entailed, but he was pretty sure it'd be lonely. So he leaned his body toward the cell his cousin was locked up in, trying to influence Rosco in that direction.

"I already told you to hush, Luke Duke." But Rosco wasn't mad. Tired maybe, cranky and in need of a nap, but he was happy enough to see Luke behind bars and to know Bo would be joining him there soon.

"Rosco," Luke said, and he was close. Right up on the bars, had himself a firm handhold on either side of his own shoulders. Voice quiet and serious in that way that meant business, all manner of business and probably not pretty business, either. Business that ended with black eyes and bruised chins, and Luke could take them as easily as he could dole them out. He wasn't afraid to fight and he wasn't afraid to lose, and he had a nasty right hook that Rosco didn't really want to mess with.

So the sheriff chose the other key, echo as the door to the empty cell clanged open. Bo stood his ground, looking at Rosco, whose face was just twitching with the urge to crow about how he had him now and Bo Duke had better just get in that cell there or he'd, he'd… Then over at Luke, whose eyebrows were down as he was about to demand some more answers, and Bo sighed. Stepped into the cell he didn't want, because it was close enough and it would have to do. The poor sheriff was addle-brained on a normal day, but when he got riled he was apt to go full out stupid, and that could end with one Duke caged upstairs and the other one down.

"He's got a right to know what he's being charged with," Luke insisted.

Rosco looked stumped. The man never had managed chewing gum and walking at the same time, and here Luke was trying to get him to talk at the same time as locking Bo up, and there was no chance it was going to work. What they had here was a standoff between one part of Rosco's brain and another (and who would have guessed that the man even had two parts to his brain?), which meant a frozen sheriff and a Duke shouldn't have to work so hard a getting himself caged. Bo let out a huff of air, then reached out and took the keys from where they were hanging limply in Rosco's hand.

"I know what I been charged with," he mumbled to Luke. Closed the cell door so gently that it gave off an almost musical sound, used one of the big keys to lock it. The sheriff seemed to come out of his stupor then, grabbed for his keys, but Bo wasn't ready to surrender them quite yet. He singled out the small one, handed them back to Rosco with that one sticking out, then put his right hand back out through the bars. Nodded at the useless handcuff there with a wordless request that it be unlocked.

"Gij," old Rosco muttered, some sort of quiet affront taken to the unspoken order, but he did what Bo wanted him to after all.

Which left him to look at his cousin, to see those dark eyebrows go up. Maybe it was a question, maybe more like a statement. _You was supposed to get me out, not get yourself in_, but sometimes reality wasn't that simple. Sometimes you had to make things up on the fly, and Luke, if anyone, ought to understand that.

"Khee!" And that was the sound of Rosco recovering himself. Now that he had his keys and his cuffs back and Luke had quieted, he was free to be sheriff of these parts once again. In full command of the situation, but not his tongue. "Well, ain't this just a fine day." Pause there to look at the two of them, then he was scuttling off toward the stairs. "Khee," again, because one khee was never enough. "I'm going to go up there and call me some Feds. That's what I'm," had to stop talking and walking both, just long enough to clip his keys back onto his belt, then he was on his way out of here. "That's what I'm going to do. And I'm gonna tell them," almost gone, but he had one more jibe to holler over his shoulder. "I caught me some Dukes. Moonshing." And then it was just him and Luke.

* * *

><p>Funny. He could have sworn that Rosco just implied that he had both Duke boys on moonshining charges, but that wasn't possible. The sheriff wasn't the smartest man in Hazzard (by a long shot) but even he had to have realized that Bo wasn't in Tilly with Luke last night. Wasn't anywhere near the car or the moonshine, and that was the point. If Bo had been with him it would have meant that he wouldn't have run off with Diane and wouldn't have planned to kill himself doing a stupid stunt. So Luke wouldn't have let himself be caught because there would have been no reason to save Bo. It was very simple logic, when it came down to it. Bo couldn't be in jail for moonshining, because Luke had deliberately gotten himself caught moonshining to keep Bo from jumping over cars.<p>

(He was tired. His reasoning might have been the slightest bit fuzzy.)

Maybe his ears were full of wax, and maybe he was just glad to see Bo alive. Maybe he was too busy thinking about the charges against him to properly listen, and then again, Rosco wasn't known for saying things terribly clearly in the first place.

(Maybe it didn't matter what the charge was, as long as it kept his cousin here until mid-afternoon and the crowd at the fairgrounds got over any notion they might have had about seeing that crazy Bo Duke go crashing into a pile of thirty-two parked cars.)

"You," he said, and his voice sounded perfectly normal in his own ears. No wax or obstructions that he could detect. "Was supposed to get me out, not get yourself put in."

It was a joke, maybe. Stupid one, because Bo wasn't really meant to do either. And because whatever those words were that came out of Bo next, they sounded miserable. Mumbled down toward the floor, because his chin was just about on his chest.

Luke could sympathize. In fact, he'd had quite a few hours to get a head start on feeling miserable, to pace, to stand, to sit for a minute and scrub at his hair, then to rise and pace once more, to grip the bars until his hands hurt, and he was tired.

So he went to the back corner of his cell, the one that abutted Bo's back corner, and he sat. Could have announced, had anyone else been present or cared, an accurate prediction of what would happen next and exactly how quickly it would come. His cousin, hair in knots and hanging down in his eyes like he'd forgotten to comb it, fingers fiddling nervously with the seam in his jeans, moving to his own back corner. A sigh and the way he dropped like a giraffe, onto his knees first, then sitting. Luke could just about see, in his mind's eye, the kitchen table. Could imagine Jesse standing across from the two of them as they sat, shoulder to shoulder, feeling the heat of each other's bodies, just waiting for him to lay down the law and then pull out the whip like he had a hundred times before.

This, of course, was nothing like that. It was many times worse, but at least that warm spot pressing against his left shoulder was familiar. Whatever happened, Bo was there beside him.


	16. Thinking in Fluent Coltrane

**Chapter Sixteen - Thinking in Fluent Coltrane**

It was quiet and he just about had himself convinced that it was a good thing. Days of barely sharing the same space for a minute without fighting and this moment of peace between them was a nice change. Refreshing, really; he was well past exhausted and—

Bo was fidgeting. Rhythmically running a hand along his own thigh, his legs bent upward leaving him to just about kiss his own knees. Like he was a flexible little boy instead of a fully grown, miserable man.

Sleep would have been a good choice. For both of them, probably, but the floor was cold and hard. They had cots, for once there were enough to go around without sharing, but he wasn't quite ready to give up where he was just yet. Not when sitting here meant being close to Bo.

He considered an even dozen different things to say, but he couldn't be sure where they'd lead and he didn't much feel like trying to have a fistfight between the bars, so he kept quiet. Figured Bo would come out with it eventually. But he didn't, he just kept right on running his hand up and down his leg like he was wiping sweat off his palm, but it wasn't that hot and he'd be taking off skin if he kept it up much longer. Luke looked over at him to see him suffering over some thought or other, as if the things inside his head were causing him pain.

"You really in here for moonshining?" It seemed a neutral enough question, safe to ask.

Made Bo slap his own knee anyway, some sort of pent up frustration getting released.

"No thanks to Rosco," he grumbled back, and it was a warped sort of nonsense, but then again, not to Bo. He was deadly serious over there. "I walked into the squad room and I put a mason jar on his desk. He told me to get out. Tried to say the courthouse was private property and I wasn't allowed to be here."

Wait. "You put a what?" A mason jar. On Rosco's desk, Bo had walked in and—"What?"

"A mason jar, Luke. Full of 'shine. Pay attention, would you?" Right, because Luke was the one with questionable brain function. "I put a mason jar on his desk and he tried to kick me out. Said I couldn't be here and that I wasn't allowed to visit you. I told him I wasn't here to visit you, but he just kept right on talking. He called me a menace and a whole bunch of other things," in between ijits and wijits, no doubt. "He said if I didn't leave he was gonna cuff me and stuff me," and all manner of other threats, including locking him under the jail, if history was any guide. Luke could just about picture the scene in his head. All except the part where there was a jar of 'shine sitting on Rosco's desk. That part still didn't make sense and Luke sure as heck wanted to get back to it, but sometimes you just had to let Bo tell things his own way. "So I told him to go ahead and offered up my hands for the cuffing, but he told me not to threaten him and to get."

Well, that seemed like good advice. And up until now, Luke wouldn't have thought Rosco had it in him.

"You didn't get," he prompted. Because this story had an end, and when they got there, Luke could go back to the beginning and demand answers or clarity or the logic behind the fact that this day, which had started out predictably badly, just kept getting worse.

"No, I didn't get." Of course he hadn't. Because Rosco was the law, and if the law told you to get, well, you just stayed put. It was clear and irrefutable reasoning. So Luke didn't refute it, he just nodded his head and made a loose gesture with his hand—_go on_. "I told him I was here to get arrested, dang it, and if he wasn't going to get around to it, I'd do it myself. I grabbed his handcuffs off the desk," and oh the nonsense syllables that must have caused. That was physical abuse of a sheriff, right there, it was a naughty-naughty and shame shame, because everyone knew Bo's name. (It scared Luke just a little bit to realize that his brain could think in fluent Coltrane.) "I started to put it on," which explained how he came down here with a cuff around one wrist and not the other. It was easy enough to put the first side on, but locking yourself into that other side, well, Luke had never been fool enough to try such a thing, but he figured it'd require a feat of dexterity. "And he asked me just what I thought I was doing."

Wow. Twice in one morning Rosco had managed to express perfectly reasonable thoughts, and Bo had—for reasons only that blonde brain of his could understand—overcome them both to get himself locked up here.

"I pointed to the mason jar and told him it was moonshine. He just kept making all these m-sounds. 'Mmm,' and then sort of a 'moo,' and he wasn't moving none except his lips." Yep, that sounded like the duly constituted sheriff of Hazzard County all right. Perfect description. "So I laid it out for him. 'I just transported that here,' I told him and then, finally, he figured it out. He stood up and started back in with the cuffing and stuffing, so I tried to get him to finish cuffing me, but he was moving too slow." Of course he was. The whole world moved just as slow as a sleeping turtle when you were Bo Duke. Anything that dared to take a second or two to get itself going was likely to be run over by old lead-foot. "So I came down here."

"And just about arrested yourself," Luke finished with a snort. It wasn't, in the least, funny. He knew that, could feel the cells get closer around them with the realization that Bo had just consigned himself to prison, too. When Luke's purpose had been to keep him alive and healthy, and how could he stand half a chance of doing that if they were in prison? "Why? You wasn't supposed to get yourself arrested," came out like an afterthought, something he might just as well have kept to himself. He'd already said that and it hadn't done anything for that miserable little look on Bo's face now.

Too young. He looked like the lost kid he'd once been, sitting all folded into himself like that with his hair in knots and curls, those wide blue eyes looking up—up, when Bo was the taller one, which went to show how much he was slouching—at him.

He wasn't supposed to get himself arrested, he wasn't supposed to be here now, contemplating prison or looking sad. He wasn't supposed to have come down here and stood quietly with Luke this morning, only to go running off so quickly. Too quickly, before Luke could tell him where Jesse was, before he could send his kid cousin off in search of the man that raised them. Safe in Cedar City, searching for their kin while the carnival went on without him here, and it would have been fine. Bo would have been livid, he would have just about hated Luke for messing up his great scheme to go off and pull the greatest stunt Hazzard had ever seen, but it would have been all right. Because he would have been alive and free while Luke was in prison, and by the end of the five years or so of his sentence, he would figure that the anger might have dissipated. Or maybe Bo would be off on the NASCAR Circuit for real by then anyway.

"I wasn't supposed to get myself arrested?" And Luke was about to see half of his plan work out after all. Bo was working up to a fit of anger, which was oddly welcome in place of all that wretchedness that had been on his face since he got himself locked up. "_You_ wasn't supposed to get _your_self arrested. What was you thinking, Luke? Doing a moonshine run when there wasn't no one around to help you out if you needed it." Well, no one being around to help him had been a critical part of the plan, really. No one to even know he was in trouble until too late, and that was the point. Fortunately, Bo didn't give him time to provide that particular, enlightening little answer, just went right on hollering. "You got caught and what was I supposed to do? Jesse ain't here to fix it and I tried, Luke, I tried. I just ain't the one with all the fine ideas." Well, he couldn't argue with that. "You're the one that's been harping on family togetherness lately, ain't you, cousin? How I shouldn't be with Diane because I needed to be with family, how I couldn't let her come between me and you. Well, here I am, Luke. She ain't between us now, is she?"

Too many questions and most of them didn't even want answers. Where to begin and which parts to admit to?

He took the coward's way out instead of trying to sort it all through. "All right," he agreed.

* * *

><p>All right. Luke said <em>all right<em> like he was providing some kind of consolation. Not conceding that Bo had a point, but smoothing over all the rough spots between them when he didn't want anything to be smooth or calm. Anger was easy, he felt justified in it. Luke was a jerk who didn't trust him to drive a car or pick the right girl or—

He was wiped out. Anger was good, but it took too much effort to nurture and maintain, and Bo just didn't have the energy for it. Not right now, and that was okay, really. Anger was a pretty loyal friend. Always came back when you were ready for it. So he let it go for now.

Sat quietly for awhile, because he wasn't feeling exactly friendly, either. Just about sick to death of fighting, of being at odds.

Some people saw the world through rose-colored glasses; Luke's were black. He could be surly and downright mean when he wanted to, expecting the worst of people and situations when he really ought to know better. He was a jerk half the time, but then again, there was that other thing he could be. All those times that Bo had made him so mad he had to be digging his nails into his palms to keep from hitting him, ready to spit and counting to ten besides—but if an outside threat came along he'd throw all that rage aside and put himself between Bo and danger. He'd take punches like he was nothing more than a sack of sand if it meant protecting the people he loved and Bo knew, without ever having to ask, that his name was at the top of the list of those his cousin would take lumps for.

Half the time he didn't have the first idea how to go about it with any kind of pleasantness, but all Luke wanted was to keep him safe and alive. And what had Bo done? Hit him first, knocked him flat on his back in the farmyard and stood over him with smug superiority. _Uncle Jesse, I ain't got no regrets about nothing, _he'd said. _Especially not this._

"I tried to get you out," he said, because it had gotten awfully quiet and Luke's stare out at the bars in front of him had gotten too unfocused and distant. Some kind of thoughts going on in that big old brain of his and that always meant trouble. (Like they could be in any more trouble than they already were.) "First."

Luke turned to him then, eyebrow cocked up and asking him to go on. If there was a certain amount of sarcasm in the gesture, that was fine. At least Luke had stopped staring off into space. When it came right down to it, he figured they'd spent enough time apart over the past few days. There was no point in continuing down that road now that they were together again.

"Diane," he said, and had to admit to himself that it was a step in the wrong direction so far as reconciling with Luke went, but she was a part of this story whether his cousin liked it or not. "She really don't like you." A snort from over there on the other side of the bars between them was all it took for Luke to convey his lack of surprise at that little development. And just maybe to announce that the feeling was mutual. "Anyway, I went back to her." Another snort, and Luke was liable to strain a muscle with all that laughing he wasn't quite doing over there. (And realizations about protectiveness or not, Luke was bucking to get hit again.) "After I left here, I went and asked her for a loan. Hell," he said, slapping his hand against his knee. Uncle Jesse would probably glower at him for cussing, but here he was sitting on the cold, filthy, concrete floor of a jail. If this wasn't an appropriate time to say _hell_, he didn't know what was. "They been selling tickets like they was the entrance fee to Boss Hogg's funeral." Which would be well-attended because the man was a public figure and longstanding resident of the region. But mostly because everyone would want to see that he was securely put in the ground where he couldn't ever fleece them again. "And I didn't know how much your bail was, but with the money she was pulling in," by using his name and his reputation, "she could have spared whatever it is. What is it, by the way?"

"Don't know," Luke shrugged, like it didn't really matter anyway. "Ain't been set yet."

Well, they'd have to rectify that, wouldn't they?

"Anyways, she told me to stop worrying about you. That I needed to think about the jump and nothing else. And after I did the jump, I could come back and get you out if I still wanted to. _If I still wanted to_," he repeated, because it nagged at him. The feeling he'd had when she said those words, like a chill that started in his gut and went right up under his skin, prickling there, making him want to fold his arms across his chest to try to warm up. Like he suddenly realized that he'd been kissing and cuddling up to ice all this time. (Like he'd suddenly realized that Luke was right about the girl.) "As if I might just decide to leave you here instead."

And maybe she had her reasons. Carl had watched him coolly walk away from Luke just yesterday when he was locked up in that very same cage, but it hadn't been the same then. A trumped-up charge of stealing their own car would never stick, not like a moonshining charge would.

"So I walked out on her. I reckon she don't much care for me anymore neither." Which was clearly breaking Luke's heart over there. "I couldn't get you out, so I got myself put in instead."

* * *

><p>It was—<p>

He wanted to think it was stupid, and in a way it was. Bo had thrown away his next few years on an impulse. Or maybe it was on a broken heart, because it couldn't have been any too pleasant to finally recognize Diane for what she was. To know Luke had been right all along.

It ought to feel like victory that the girl had finally revealed what went on under that pretty little façade of hers. Balloons and streamers in celebration of Bo finally catching wise, but funny thing, he didn't want to celebrate. Didn't want to be right about the girl and wouldn't have been any happier to be wrong. It made an impossible mess of his thoughts and he didn't like it. Things would be a lot tidier if only Bo would listen to him earlier, or more often.

He bit back any consideration of uttering _I told you so_. Because it wouldn't do any good, but then again, he couldn't come up with a single thing that would make any of this better.

"You wasn't supposed to get arrested," he said again, because it was the one bit of truth he could say out loud without being cruel.

"Well," Bo answered back and stopped picking at the nonexistent lint on his jeans to look over at him out of the corners of his eyes. "Neither was you."

It wasn't funny, which must have been why they laughed. Bitter and harsh, with sharp edges that left his throat raw. Somewhere on the ragged edge of losing it (or Bo was, boy never was too good at boundaries, and tears could come out of laughter as easily as out of temper) and he reckoned they could do with a little sobriety.

"Yeah, well," ought to just about do it. "We're going to prison, you know."

A second, only that much to consider it. To try to picture it, and then there was Bo. A little shrug, a smile that might have been closer to a grimace and, "You'll think of a way out."

The utter faith in that notion, in him. Bo knew danger and he knew risk and he figured that neither was a threat, because Luke could fix it. Bo believed in him like he believed the sun would rise in the morning, and what had he done to earn that kind of loyalty? Mocked and teased, been nasty and surly and just plain mean. Hit him in the face, and there Bo was, trusting him all the same.

All tangled up in hard and painful thoughts, when there was the halfway welcome sound of feet clunking down the stairs.

"Hi, y'all," and of course it was Enos; Rosco wasn't exactly agile, but he wasn't the same kind of clumsy as his deputy. The sheriff's stumbles happened when he was excited, and kind of expressed themselves in an uneven lope. Enos was more the tripping sort, the kind who fell flat on his face because he forgot to put his hands out to catch himself. "Is it okay if I interrupt?" Or maybe he was just too kind to brace himself against a fall. Maybe he just didn't want to hurt the ground.

"Sure, Enos, come on down. We could use some friendly company," Bo assured him. And maybe he already knew that the deputy was destined to be welcome, what with the smell of food accompanying him.

"It ain't quite lunch time," Enos informed them. "But I figured didn't neither of you have breakfast. Least I know old Luke there didn't. And I don't reckon you did, either, Bo." Funny little blush blossoming up on his cheeks like he was confessing to something embarrassing.

Bo was on his feet already. Breakfast or no breakfast, he was ready for food right now. Luke had to admit, as he pulled himself up to his feet, that the notion was welcome to him to, and it smelled oddly good.

"They ain't," Enos said, the brim of his hat dipping down below his eye line as he tipped his head forward. "Regulation," he added as he handed a—hotdog? Dang right they weren't regulation—through the bars to Bo, then another one for him. Slathered in ketchup and piccalilli, and that was nowhere near regulation. "But they was already made and since it looks like the carnival ain't going to draw much of a crowd now that they know you ain't doing the jump, Bo, they're selling them at half price. Which is cheaper than the chipped beef over at the café, so I reckon Boss will be happy I brought them to you."

"Speaking of Boss," Luke said around the half a hotdog that he'd already crammed into his mouth. Uncle Jesse would tan his hide, but he reckoned that the old man would have to wait a few years to get around to doing it, what with how he'd be locked away soon enough. "Why ain't he been down here to set our bail?" Or to gloat. Seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the commissioner.

"Well, I reckon he'll be here eventually, Luke. Right now he's counting the ticket money at the carnival, minus the refunds they had to give because you ain't gonna be there, Bo." Yeah, that was twice that had gotten mentioned, just in case Bo had been too busy devouring his hotdog to hear it the first time. "I ain't sure why he's doing it, except he done rented the fairgrounds to her and he keeps saying that makes him part owner or something. Anyway, she didn't look too happy about Boss doing all that counting."

Funny how the hotdog in his mouth didn't taste so good anymore. It had the flavor of all the things that had come between him and Bo, like car exhaust and Diane's perfume and failure and bloody lips. All the things he couldn't figure out how to fix, and it was like eating sandpaper. Rough and dry and—

"Well," Enos said with that smile that didn't falter, never took a second to realize the sort of news he'd just brought them. "I got to go. You boys behave yourselves now, you hear?" And that silly grin was gone, just like that, headed back up the stairs.

Leaving him alone with a man who'd just been reminded of what he'd walked away from, and the consequences of that walking. Sure, Bo had gotten angry with Diane when she'd refused to help him bail Luke out, but for days before that he'd insisted that he loved the girl.

And Luke still didn't have half an idea of what to say when his cousin's chin dipped and his eyelashes got wet.

"Bo," he started.

And his cousin's head came up, but there were no tears on his face, only spitting-mad righteousness.

"You're an idiot," Bo hissed at him.


	17. If the Odds Were Even

**Chapter Seventeen - If the Odds Were Even**

"You're an idiot." It wasn't news, both of them down here in their separate cages already knew that.

He wiped his hand on his jeans and grimaced about it. Hotdogs were easy enough to cram down your throat but they weren't entirely tidy and Enos hadn't seen fit to bring them napkins. Or anything to drink for that matter, and he was thirsty.

"You said that already," he pointed out to Bo. "And I ain't argued with you."

"This is different," his exasperated cousin pointed out. Seemed like it sure was frustrating to have to lay out for him all the various ways in which he was stupid. "You already agreed to being an idiot for getting caught running moonshine and I figure your word is binding on that."

Well, it was nice to know that even if he was a double idiot, his honor as a Duke was presumed intact.

"All right," he said and he figured, from the way he was getting glared at, that whatever he was an idiot for now had to be worse than getting caught running moonshine and getting himself consigned to time in prison.

Maybe he was missing that first time he got called an idiot, that moment of silent communion that had preceded it, the sense he'd had that despite the way they'd gone at each other yesterday, fists pounding into each other's faces, he and Bo were bound together. Maybe he was missing being alone with the bars where it was quiet and he could feel righteous in sacrificing himself to the greater good of the family. Maybe he knew that he deserved whatever Bo was going to say next, that being right about Diane's intentions did not negate all the wrongs he'd committed along the way to proving it. Maybe he didn't want to hear it anyway, and maybe that didn't matter one bit.

"You're an idiot because you didn't think I could make the jump."

That, he wasn't expecting. He'd figured that once Bo saw through Diane's charming little act he'd see that—well that the jump was insane, maybe. That she used her wiles to get men to do things that they wouldn't even consider otherwise. And that in some inexplicable way, failure was worth more than success in her crazy circus of a carnival.

She had to be a nasty little thing, a real piece of work. Because she'd wrapped one arm around the neck of that Bob Dexter fellow in Cedar City, and kissed him like she meant it, like it was more than just good luck she was wishing him, then let go. Watched him, same as the rest of the spectators in those stands did, saw how the car he was driving was perfectly in line with the ramp and moving at a fine speed until suddenly it wasn't. Losing power when it was too late to pull back and save himself, then crashing down. Screech of metal, explosion of shattered glass and heat of flames. She'd looked upset then, for all of a minute or two, while the crew tended to the wreck and driver.

But a week later she'd shown up here like nothing had happened. Like Hazzard was a fresh new world for her to conquer, and she'd set her eyes and lips on Bo, who was superficially similar, long of hair and body. Kissing him just the same as that poor Bob guy, saying those wooing words that made him think she loved him when all she wanted was for him to go down in flames.

"Only a fool would try, Bo," to do that jump for her. To give her whatever disgusting form of pleasure she got out of kissing men then watching them just about kill themselves for her.

"I ain't no fool, Luke," he got informed. "And I could have made the jump. You just don't want to believe that. You don't like that I could have done it, but no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't have."

It had been life and death. Bo was hours from smashing the General into more tons of steel than he liked to think about, from broken bones and internal bleeding, brain damage and who knew what else. The boy had been rushing headlong toward the kind of jeopardy that led to too-bright waiting rooms in hospitals where his distraught family waited while he went into surgery, stood there holding onto each other and weeping until the doctor came out, still covered in blood and just shook his head. _He didn't make it._ Bo had come within inches from killing himself and he was turning this whole thing into a juvenile competition over which of the Duke boys was a better driver. _I could have and you couldn't, and if there weren't bars in between us now I'd punch you all over again. I'd hit you for being a jackass, for saying bad things about my girl and for—_

Not believing in me.

Luke was angry, could feel the heat of it burning a hole in his belly like a volcano that wanted more than anything to erupt. At Bo for being an idiot, for being gullible, for fighting against him now when Luke reckoned he'd sacrificed plenty just to keep him alive. He wanted the bars between them gone every bit as much as Bo did, so he could take that hit Bo stood ready to dole out, and then hit him right back. Or just—get up in his face and tell him how it really was, force the brat to confront the fact that life was more than just smiling and kissing girls and jumping cars. That there were consequences and sometimes they were so heavy that you couldn't stand up under the burden of them, so sharp they'd slice you to ribbons and leave you to bleed out right where you stood.

But there was that other thing, nagging at the back of his mind.

You didn't believe in me.

All that anger, all the things he wanted to prove or just pound into Bo's thick skull, all the pent up violence within him got expressed in four fingers, raking through his own hair.

"Bo," he said, kept it quiet. Serious, and it probably sounded just as threatening as if he'd been cocking back a fist. But Bo was loud, and yelling only made him louder. This sort of intense quiet was about the only thing he'd stop and listen to. "If the odds was even—"

"Dang it, Luke!" Or maybe not, maybe there was nothing that would make Bo's brain quit spinning in those same dizzy circles. "Just admit it! You're jealous. You been nothing but petty and mean because you couldn't do that jump." It was like a tornado in his cousin's pretty little head. Going in loops and destroying everything it touched.

"If the odds was even," he hissed out, "If—"

"You ain't nothing but a coward, Luke. You got yourself a stripe of yellow runs up one side and down the other—"

"Bo!" he ground out between gritted teeth, but there was no point.

"You would rather be here," no point at all, because that tornado that was busily devouring all of Bo's brain cells had not yet run its course. "You'd rather get yourself locked up in jail and sent off to prison than admit that I can do something better than you."

"You done?" he asked. "You said everything you need to say about what a chicken I am?"

"I reckon," Bo snapped back at him. "So long as you'll admit it's true."

"Bo," came out bitten back, all chewed up and rough. Calm and threatening all manner of violence at the same time, because he'd just about had it. "If the odds was even, if Cooter had stacked them thirty-two cars and you and me had built the ramp ourselves, if I got to tune the General right before, if we could have been sure that there wasn't no mitigating factors, I would happily—" oh, not happily. There was nothing in the world that would allow him to be happy about it. It was still dangerous and Bo was about the only reason he wasn't halfway crazy. Hazzard was a sleepy little town except when it wasn't. Everything about the place was cyclical, lap after lap of the same thing in a slightly different shape. Like those sugar cookies Daisy made at Christmas. Some were trees and some were snowflakes and some were Santa himself, but they all tasted the same. Hazzard was like that, but then there was Bo. Chocolate chips stuck in a recipe that didn't call for them, and it made the cookies worth sampling, because they had something special inside. They had Bo. "Have watched you make the jump. Heck, I would have sat right there in the passenger seat and watched it all up close and personal."

* * *

><p>Admitting things didn't come easily to Luke. Confessing was easier, it carried with it the promise of a whipping. Back when their hides were younger and more used to taking licks, he would have sworn that Luke actually relished confessing. Like it was some kind of game between him and the man that raised them, as if they were on a hunting trip together. Just wandering through the twisted thicket of their lives, in search of the boundary. That line that shouldn't be crossed and when they found it, Luke couldn't help but stick a toe over. And then the belt would come out. Confessions, Luke could handle those.<p>

Admitting things was a whole different problem. It meant acknowledging that a brain other than his own had come up with something worth saying, it meant swallowing some little bit of pride. Bo couldn't ever be anything but wrong, because Luke always had to be right. It was just a fact of life and the whole clan probably ought to have adjusted to it long ago.

But what he'd said, those words about how if the odds had been even, Luke would have sat right there in the car and done the jump with him, well, it was—something. It was so close to saying something real, to giving in. It might have been hard for his cousin to manage this almost-admitting that he'd done, but then again Luke made everything harder than it had to be.

And Bo couldn't shake the notion that it was a distraction. It was old gloom-and-doom going over that same old ground about how the stunt wasn't safe. Utter nonsense, just the sort of thing Luke would say to get out of acknowledging that Bo was better than him at something. It was about time someone called Luke on these little bluffs he pulled, about time Bo said something—

Bumping and thumping like thunder coming down the metal stairs, and he let himself hope. That it was Carl again, maybe, come to get him out after all. But he wouldn't go, he wouldn't budge from his cell unless there was enough bail money for both Duke boys. Even if the first thing he'd do when they were free would be to explain a few things to Luke about how sick he was of hearing that the jump was dangerous. With his fists, if need be.

"Well, well, well, well, well, well and well," like a counterpoint to the footsteps. Smell of cigar smoke and stale mints filling up the dank basement, and then the white glow of that impeccable suit reminding them all that some people had to work the dirt for a living while others sat around and ate sweets. Boss Hogg, taking up all the air in the room and all the space in front of the cages they were caught in. Chins, all three of them, raised in pride and trying to puff out his chest but that only made his stomach bigger. Rosco was there, too, squirming and wiggling like a happy puppy with a new chew toy, and somehow managing to cower even as he strutted.

Bo's mouth closed with a click of his molars. Whatever he had to tell Luke could wait, and he certainly had no plans whatsoever to say anything at all to Boss. He might not have gotten his rights read to him, but he knew them well enough. He had the right to remain silent.

"Lookie what we got here," Boss crowed around the fat cigar clenched in his teeth. At Rosco, at himself, at the cement that surrounded him. He was a happy man and he didn't care whether or not anyone was listening. He just needed to share his cheer with the world. "Ain't you boys pretty," he gloated. It was the kind of thing a man might want to take as a compliment, if only he'd combed his hair this morning or taken any real time to get dressed, if he'd slept enough that there weren't likely to be bags the size of Texas under his eyes. Boss wasn't sarcastic though, it wasn't an out and out insult. More like amazed, awed, and a little bit excited. "Behind all them bars. That's just a fine sight right there."

Luke was probably counting to ten over there; Bo was just clenching his jaw shut as hard as he could. Most days he would have smiled at the commissioner and his fumbling lackey, maybe offered up a sly comment about how Boss would look pretty behind bars, too. But this wasn't just any day. This right here might just as well be Christmas morning to the greedy man in front of them, with presents wrapped up shiny under his tree, and they were all for him. Bo and Luke Duke, in matching silken bows, guilty and nothing to do but await their miserable fate.

But the Duke boys' silence went unnoticed in all the ridiculous sounds Rosco was making, the gijjes and goos that would make as much sense coming out of the mouth of a two year old. Giggling victory, and even Boss had to raise an impressed eyebrow at what his fool sheriff had gone and managed to accomplish this time.

"I reckon old Agent Roach will think that's just as pretty a sight as I do, don't you, Rosco?"

"Agent Roach?" Luke queried and somehow it sounded so even, so natural for as much as he must have wanted to deck both the gloating idiots in front of them. "What's he got to do with this?"

"Well, you see," Rosco menaced, but it was funny how he didn't get too close to the bars or anything. Mostly he kept his distance and hid behind the girth of his boss, even if he was the taller one. "There ain't no Federal Agent assigned to this district just now. So I had to call Atlanta." And just guess who was stationed there now. It was enough to make Bo wish he hadn't left poor old Andy in quite so many ditches back when he worked these parts. For all of a second, then he felt the corners of his mouth curling up anyway. Agent Roach had never caught them. No one had, until now, that was. And in truth, Bo had caught himself, so his record was still perfect. Of all the agents that had chased them, Andy was one of the more interesting ones. Halfway good at his job, but no match for the Duke boys. "Agent Roach ought to be here in an hour or so to collect you."

"I hope you gave him our best," Luke answered back, same old sass as if they weren't awaiting extradition or execution or whatever manner of threat they were actually facing. Seemed like the sort of thing a man ought to know, really, ought to be fully aware of the precise consequences of getting caught doing that illegal thing he'd done all his life. Could just about hear Luke laughing at him in his head. _Just like you_, went the gist of it, _to go thinking about the punishment_ after_ you went and deliberately made sure Rosco caught you doing the crime_. But they'd never been caught and never even imagined getting caught so he couldn't see where he was supposed to have thought about it before. "You letting him set bail?"

Funny, that made those pudgy little fingers yank the cigar right out from between those pouting lips. Luke might just have gone and besmirched Boss's honor or somehow pointed out that getting the Feds involved meant Boss giving up rights as pertained to his shiny little prisoners.

"I don't reckon there'll be no bail on the likes of you."

What? "What?" What had Boss told Andy they'd done? If the charge was moonshining, there'd be bail and it wouldn't be cheap, but it wouldn't be exorbitant, either. And he could only speak for himself, but he couldn't say there was anything else he'd done wrong, other than putting a mason jar of moonshine down on the sheriff's desk. "What are you talking about, Boss?" Could feel the heat of anger in his chest, rushing up to his face. Always made him turn red; he hated that. "You ain't going to get us put away on no trumped up charges. Just you wait until Uncle Jesse hears," (and where was Uncle Jesse anyway? He really ought to have asked Luke that by now) "what you're threatening us with—"

"Bo," came quietly from the cell next to his. Luke, shaking his head slightly, little curl there at the corner of his lips. _So easy to rile_, it said. _Don't let him get the better of you._ Probably best not to threaten what Uncle Jesse would do anyway. Sounded like the sort of words a five-year-old would say.

Somehow, Boss got just that much happier, watching him get chastised by Luke.

"I would have been here sooner," he said, putting the cigar back into his mouth and looking just as pleased as punch about it all. Glitter in his eyes because he was on top of the world, watching Duke boys snipe at each other while awaiting their doom. "But I had to go repossess the Carnival of Thrills. And supervise the crews packing it up nice and tidy for me."

"What?" That one came from Luke. "What are you talking about now, Boss?" Almost sounded tired, maybe bored. Done with being taunted and just pushing this thing along to some sort of a conclusion.

"Oh, didn't you know? Well Miss Benson come to me before renting the fairgrounds, you see, and she didn't have enough money to make the payment. So I extended her a little loan, and if she can't pay me back by today, I get to take over her carnival. And since you," cigar back out of his mouth and being used as a pointer to be jabbed at Bo, "got yourself locked up and can't make the jump, she had to refund just about all the tickets. So she ain't hardly got no money and now the carnival is mine." Dragged out that last word, just about growled it in his greed.

"Boss," he said and it was close to a whine. There were things Diane had told him and things she hadn't. There were things she'd been willing to do for him and things she'd held out on, but he'd never realized that she stood to lose everything if he backed out on her. Didn't make it any easier that she'd tried to dismiss Luke as though he was just some stranger asking for a handout, but maybe it explained it a little bit.

"Oh, Miss Benson had some choice words for you, Bo Duke. She had some fine things to say, such as—"

"Boss," Luke interrupted, and he'd taken a few steps right up to the bars of his cell, as if he could somehow place his body between Bo and the bully, just like he'd done all their lives. "You ain't got to go telling Miss Benson's tales for her." It was a threat and an attempt to shame all at once. The sort of thing Aunt Lavinia would have said about not going around spreading rumors or repeating nasty words said in the heat of anger. It was Luke Duke as protective punk, ready to dole out a few punches, and grandmother, offering wise advice, all rolled up into a few words. "If she's got something to say to Bo, I reckon she can do it herself. And he can wait until then to hear it."

"Well," was Boss trying to recover, trying to make it look like his bad behavior hadn't just been corrected by a Duke boy. "It don't make no nevermind. You boys is on your way to prison anyway."

* * *

><p>"Bo," he said as soon as Boss had waddled his way back upstairs with Rosco, his faithful, tail-wagging puppy, following behind. "Did you get your rights read to you or your one phone call?"<p>

"What?" his brilliant cousin replied. "Luke, where's Uncle Jesse?" Apparently it had just occurred to him to wonder.

"Cedar City." Or thereabouts. Honestly, he and Daisy ought to be on their way back to Hazzard now, or soon. He didn't have his watch with him and he didn't know the exact hour, but if Boss had taken the time to foreclose on the carnival, it had to be going on afternoon by now. "Bo," but he wouldn't know where to find his boys, would run right out to the fairgrounds and by the time he got turned around and send back here, the two of them might well be behind the metal cage in the backseat of an official federal agent's cruiser, heading south to Atlanta. "Did you get your call?"

"No," came back at him, still confused. "Why's Jesse there?"

"He went to talk to the guy who crashed in the Leap for Life last week," Luke explained. Then, "Rosco!" he yelled. Should have thought of this sooner, shouldn't have let the sheriff get away. Heck, he and Boss were probably holed up in the commissioner's office, giggling in glee at their good fortune. "Rosco!"

"Luke." Confusion looked cute on Bo. Most people just looked silly with their eyebrows all knitted in the middle, wrinkles on their forehead, but somehow Bo pulled off adorable. Like a frazzled raccoon, maybe. Then it changed. Fuzzy eyebrows down and he wasn't so much befuddled as angry. "Why would Jesse go talking to him? Him crashing ain't got nothing to do with—"

"Bo, we ain't got no time to argue." Seemed like he'd said those words before. Maybe a bunch of times over the past few days, because about all he and Bo had accomplished in that time was getting under each other's skin. "I sent Jesse and Daisy out there to talk to him and see if there was anything wrong with his car, okay? We've got to get you that one phone call, and we can argue after."

Dirty look from Bo that was trying to figure out if he was being hoodwinked, and whether Luke was just saying whatever it would take to shut him up.

"Listen," he said, gritting his teeth against the way he wasn't fully trusted. He reckoned maybe he'd earned that somewhere around the time he let Rosco impound the General over a broken taillight. "They ought to be on their way back by now. You got to make your one phone call to Cooter and get him to go out looking for the Jeep on the road between here and Cedar City. If Cooter can find Jesse and get him here before Andy shows up maybe we'll have a chance." To get out on bail, or just to say some sort of goodbye until they met again in court. Whichever way it worked out, they needed Uncle Jesse here. "And when you do that, you can come back down here and I'll put my face right up to the bars so you can hit me if you want, all right?"

"Enos!" Bo started yelling. Yeah, of course he did. The offer of a free shot at Luke Duke's chin didn't come around every day. It was worth whatever it took to collect on it. "Rosco!"


	18. Fighting Through the Bars

**Chapter Eighteen - Fighting Through the Bars**

"Bo Duke, what the heck is going on?" The ever-charming Cooter Davenport, nagging at him like a wife with a hankering to know why he was late for dinner. (Or maybe like a cranky old uncle – somewhere when no one was looking, the town mechanic had gone from half-drunk fool to Jesse-in-training.)

Luke sent Jesse and Daisy to Cedar City to snoop around. To try to find evidence against Diane and the utter betrayal of that action had slapped Bo across the face with as much sting as if it had been his cousin's broad hand hitting him. They'd—Luke had come out to the fairgrounds and apologized for the way he'd been acting, had offered a hand to shake and—

All that anger in his head made it hard to concentrate on what he was supposed to be doing.

"Listen, Cooter," he tried anyway, because he really did want to get back downstairs. He didn't want to hit Luke, not mostly, but if that big old face actually mashed itself between the bars he might not be able to control himself. And he might not be too sorry about that lack of control, either. "Me and Luke's both been arrested."

"Well, I know that." Could just about hear their friend's eyes rolling back in his head. "I asked Diane where you went and she said something about you going off after your babysitter and having your priorities all wrong. She didn't sound none too pleased, but I reckoned you'd be back shortly so I just waited for you." Okay, so Diane hadn't been particularly excited about him choosing Luke over her. It wasn't news; why did everyone have to keep reminding him? Day after day of his friends and family siding with Luke against him, and now Cooter was siding with Diane. What, exactly, did they want him to do? Diane couldn't stand Luke and Luke couldn't stand Diane, and he'd just been stuck there between them. Had tried to stay there suspended in the middle of their petty squabbling, but it hadn't worked. Luke wouldn't give an inch and Diane was offering him miles, and—"Eventually Boss showed up absolutely crowing and saying everyone might just as well go home now, seeing as the Dukes was in jail and there wouldn't be no need to hold the carnival without its star attraction."

"Cooter," he tried to interrupt. Because he was up here in the drafty squad room with Enos standing not ten feet away. Eyes down and twiddling with his own fingers, every bit the nervous little boy. The deputy had tried not to allow this, hemming and hawing over how he was under strict orders not to let the Duke boys get loose for even a second, and he wasn't to be tricked, hoodwinked or otherwise fooled into letting them escape. Bo had sworn up, down, and sideways that he had no intentions of running off anywhere, and then Luke had started growling about rights. Bo had had rights (not that they'd been read to him or anything) including one phone call, and that was what swayed things in his favor. Hazzard's deputy never could tolerate injustice or the willful noncompliance with any law. Even the ones that afforded rights to Duke boys when the county commissioner wanted them to have none.

But Enos was still fidgeting and still eavesdropping. Boss and Rosco couldn't be too far away either; Bo could hear those stupid giggles echoing around from somewhere. And more than those things, there just wasn't a lot of time to spare. Of course, old Cooter didn't know that.

"So I figured, well, Boss was up to something and I asked what y'all was locked up for. I reckon Rosco was about to tell me, but Boss started making all these 'dat' noises and then he told me it wasn't none of my business."

Which, technically, it wasn't, unless Uncle Jesse got around to adopting Cooter right and proper, and making him an official Duke. Of course if he did that, he'd have to make the same offer to Enos, followed by about half the town's young men. Including Boss's somewhat-cousin Cletus, which could get really messy. A Duke adopting a Hogg and all.

"Then I told them I'd just come downtown and ask you for myself, but Boss Hogg said the courthouse was closed, and ain't no one getting in, leastwise if they wasn't wearing no badge. Can you believe that?" Yes, he could. "A public building." True enough. But its doors had gotten locked for lesser causes. Like hot days and cold ones, flies and fleas and flurries, that fake plague a couple of years back and because Boss wanted to enjoy his morning snack in peace. "I pointed out to Boss that he don't have no badge and he told me he didn't want to see no more of me today. So I came back here." To the garage, where Bo had thought himself lucky to have reached the mechanic, but now he was having his doubts. Might have been easier to call any random farmhouse in the region and ask for help.

"Cooter," he interjected again. Thought that now that his friend had expressed all of his irate anger at the same old injustices of the county where he'd spent most of his life, he might actually hush up for a minute. Or two, because Bo needed that next breath. That chance to run his hand through his uncombed hair then let it drop down to smack down against his own thigh. "Me and Luke's been busted for moonshining." Because saying that was the same as cussing, as saying every bad word he'd ever learned. It was like damning his own family name and heritage, it was all those things he'd blocked from his mind when his only consideration had been getting back to Luke, whatever it took.

"What?" A low whistle of disbelief. "Well, I'll be." Bo reckoned he'd best jump in here before he got a list of all the things Cooter would be, from a suck-egg mule to a monkey's uncle.

"Jesse and Daisy's in Cedar City." And there it was again, the bitter taste at the back of his tongue, like swallowing a lemon without any sugar. Luke had schemed against him. Again, when his last scheme had been just genius enough to have nearly gotten the General crushed, his cousin had sent their kin off in search of whatever manner of evidence they could find to prove that Bo was an idiot. "And the feds is coming down from Atlanta to fetch me and Luke." Or him and Benedict Arnold, might as well be honest about it. "I need you to go find Jesse and Daisy and bring them here before we get dragged off to—" Some sentences didn't bear finishing. Not when he wasn't ready to think about it yet, not when Enos was standing right over there, turning sort of pink while he studied his boots and thought those same thoughts about where he and Luke were headed to next.

"You got any idea where they are?" Yeah, he had every idea.

Luke had sent them, it was true. But then again, they'd gone, and neither one of his kin was likely to go anywhere or do anything they didn't believe in. Sure, Luke got away with giving orders to men twice his age as some sort of remnant from his Marine days, but Dukes were funny about things like that. They abided by the law only when they weren't breaking it, and they followed orders so long as they agreed with them in the first place.

"Well, Luke said they ought to be on their way back here by now." From where they'd been sent to snoop around behind his back and he couldn't help it. He didn't want those words in his head on endless repeat, but there they were anyway. Maybe he was going to have to take Luke up on hitting him, just so the cycle of his angry thoughts could stop. "So they're somewhere between there and here, I guess."

Mumblings coming across the line that Bo could only halfway pay attention to, because Enos was fidgeting a little more insistently now. One phone call was within his rights, but chatting and exchanging gossip wasn't. He should have been done by now, should have been safely locked back into his cell so that Rosco would never know he'd ever been out.

"Well, that's a lot of ground to cover," Cooter was remarking. "It could take me awhile to find them, what with all the roads they could take." A thoughtful listing of possibilities followed, but Bo wasn't listening to them, not when his hearing was taken up by attending to one high-pitched sheriff's giggle followed by the growl of a commissioner whose last nerve was being worked. Couldn't glean any details from the sounds, but they sure were getting closer. Enos started silently pleading with those big, brown eyes of his, and there was nothing to do but take this here conversation by the horns.

"Cooter," he interrupted. Not nice, his aunt would shake her head and tsk at him were she still alive, but sometimes politeness had to get tossed out the window. "Go out route eighty-one." Last week's acrobatic drive to see the carnival out in Cedar City had alternated between Jesse's pride at how he handled the car as he took them cross country in search of ever-larger bumps over which to catch air, and the oldster grumbling something about there being perfectly safe and straight roads between here and there. The straightest of them all was route eighty-one. "And be quick about it. I got to go." He hung up before getting a response, but he'd have to trust that he'd been heard and understood. Because he and Enos were about to be happened upon any minute now, and he didn't want any lawman to go getting bright ideas that the best way to deal with sneaky Duke boys getting out of their cells was to cage them in disparate parts of the building. Didn't want his fist locked up here when Luke's face was downstairs, and the two had themselves a date.

But when Enos got him down there, safe and sound without either of his bosses being the wiser, Bo's fist didn't make it any further than resting on his own hip.

"Luke," he said after the echo of the deputy's feet going back up the stairs had died and there was nothing but the sound of a fly trapped down there with them, doing lazy laps around the cells. Nothing to look at but the blue of his cousin's tired eyes, nothing to smell but the stale air laced with the carnival food they'd eaten earlier, nothing to feel but that nagging itch under his skin. "Why," _don't you trust me? Do you have to insist on thinking I'm stupid? Do you have to make me so mad that I skip right past the urge to hit you and launch right on towards tears?_ "Did you send Jesse and Daisy off to Cedar City?"

* * *

><p>God, did he have to ask him like that? Throat tight, the tips of his ears and nose pink, eyes already too wet and threatening to get wetter? Back of his hand across his face acting like he was scratching some kind of an itch when both of them here knew what he was really trying to wipe away? Damn it all, did he have to be so vulnerable all the time?<p>

(Yes, he did. Because he was Bo and he trusted the world around him far too much. Expected good intentions from everyone he met and some people had no inclination to live up to all the blind faith that Bo placed in them.)

"Bo," he said, trying to be patient. _He's younger than you,_ like a litany in his head in the voice of his deceased aunt. _You need to be tolerant of him._ And he tried, he did. But it was too hard, watching Bo set himself up for a fall over and over again, never learning. And somehow or other it was always Luke that wound up breaking Bo's heart for him. "Sit," he added, gesturing loosely toward the cot on the far side of his cell. But he didn't get listened to. Bo just stood there, hands defiantly on hips, shoulders taut like maybe he wanted to fight after all, face betraying all that bravado with the pink splotches blossoming up toward red. "You remember the last guy who tried that jump."

"Sure I do," Bo snapped back at him. Angry and already yelling because the more he blustered and made noise, the more he hoped to drown out the words he didn't want to hear. "Of course I do, Luke—"

There was more that followed, details of Bo's memory maybe, or insistence that just because that poor sucker crashed didn't mean Bo would. Luke didn't know the details because he found himself shouting too, drawn into a stupid competition for who had the louder voice. It was habit, it was everything the two of them had done their whole lives, it was enough to shake the timbers, Jesse would say. It was a pair of fools that were big enough to know better by now, it was going to draw them a little crowd down here in a minute, Boss smirking around his cigar and chuckling deeply at how easily Duke could turn on Duke—it was stupid, and it had to stop.

Luke quit, mid-yell. Walked up to the bars that ran between him and his cousin, gripped them low. Put his face up close, right there within hitting range. Quiet, that was the trick, so quiet that ears had to be strained to hear, and all shouting stopped. "The offer still stands," he just about whispered. _Hit me. You might feel better._ It wasn't all that different from what Jesse had done to him just yesterday on the side of the road as Daisy sat in the Jeep and watched them.

Frozen moment, Bo considering it. Only long enough for Luke to remember that his jaw was still bruised from the last time they did this, and then the headshake came. "Naw," was all Bo said, head dipping and looking about as miserable as a beaten dog. Made it harder to say what had to be said. Would've been better of Bo had hit him, at least then he'd be close enough to reach out and grab hold of. Bo handled rough patches a little easier with the touch of a gentle hand.

"You remember," he started again. Figured it was just one of those things, like going to the dentist, that was best dealt with quickly before what was already rotten got worse. Might have been better if he had some painkillers to offer, but he didn't. "How before he even tried the jump, he was kissing Diane?"

"So what?" All stubbornness and little boy bravado. Bo was a good kisser with a pretty face. He'd stolen girls out from under other men before. "That don't mean nothing."

"I reckon it meant something to him." Luke offered. "And I reckon he's in the hospital in Cedar City now and wondering why his girlfriend don't love him no more."

"Luke," tried to sound tough, but it came out all cracked around the edges.

"She let him go too easy, Bo. Like she had practice with it." Like stunt men grew on trees, just waiting for her to come and pluck them down. Like they were easy to find and kissing them was just a bonus. "Like it had happened before."

_Shut up_, he might have wanted Bo to scream, an echo of the entire week. _You ain't got no call to go talking about her like that_. Might have wanted that one last resistance, Bo all but plugging his ears not to hear him, because all that red-faced yelling wasn't half as painful to watch as what was coming next.

Bo walking away from him, off to the far wall and the cot. Silent. Sitting down turning to face out at nothing, just staring at bars and cinderblocks. Hurt, lost, and Jesse would have known what to say, Aunt Lavinia could have handled it. Even Daisy would have had some idea. Luke didn't so he just stood and watched Bo pull his knees up and wrap his arms around them. Silent. Folding into himself, letting his own body form a shield around his heart.

* * *

><p>The silence got to be too long, the staring too much. The sigh from over there and he figured it was just about fair in its own twisted way. Luke didn't like the cold shoulder unless he was the one on the giving end. Now he knew what it was like to deal with a man who wouldn't talk to him.<p>

Except that the intention was not as simple as all that. What he was giving Luke wasn't cold or warm or anything at all. He was just thinking, was all. Thinking at first about how maybe he should have hit Luke after all, and then about how much of a burden if must be for his cousin to lug around that big old brain every day, the one that thought it knew everything. Then he thought about Diane and how she'd never once called him stupid or compared his intellect to small vegetables, how she'd been so sweet and supportive—until suddenly she hadn't. Finally he got around to Cedar City, to that guy who'd crashed there. Bob, who'd kissed Diane like he owned her (or she owned him) then moments later he'd been loaded into an ambulance. After that Diane had been here. Never looking back, having nowhere else to be, not once making a trip to any hospital anywhere in the region to check on anyone. Not a former employee, not a friend, not a man she'd kissed and maybe said she loved.

After that there'd been just minutes of letting that sink in and saturate every part of him. Of letting it hurt.

Then it was the sigh, and Bo was rubbing his face. Fingers through his hair then back to his face, but no amount of rubbing did any good. The truth was still there.

Still there and just as rotten as it had ever sounded when I came out of Luke's mouth. _Why is she making a play for you, unless she's got an angle? Maybe she's just a little bit out of your league._

He took some more time to chew that over. To remember all the ways in which he'd defended her and all the times his kin had rolled their eyes at him. _The little one's being stubborn again_, their looks had said, _but it's just a tantrum. He'll get over it._ Like fuel to the fire that was already burning inside him and it would just figure that it would end in a blistering explosion.

Except it didn't. It ended real quietly, just a whisper from the other jail cell. Luke shifting his weight from one foot to the other and Bo wasn't looking at him, but he knew. That head cocking to the side, hands on hips, mouth opening to say something and he could wait for it. It would be polite, he reckoned, to let his cousin get through saying whatever it was that he felt needed to be said.

"Dang it!" It would be good manners, but it was just him and Luke down here. Just two boys and he figured that camping rules applied here. When they went off into the woods alone, they didn't comport themselves with any kind of grace, they didn't excuse themselves after unfortunate noises. They ate with their hands and grunted when they wanted something instead of asking nicely. A jail cell wasn't the wilderness, but it wasn't their kitchen either and he figured the bars around them came closer to being trees than they did to being fine china. "What? Go ahead, Luke, you got something more to say, just say it."

"Bo," Luke mumbled and look at that, his hands were up in surrender. Too late for that, they were already behind bars. Or maybe the gesture was meant to be calming. _No harm meant here_, but it was too late for that, too. Too late for conciliatory motions that tried to sweep the rest of this mess under the rug now that Luke said all those things that left Bo feeling like a jackass. Sure, his big cousin wanted to make nice now, to act all gentle and sweet while the baby of the family cried on his shoulder, but it wouldn't work. It couldn't work, because Luke was never satisfied to just get his way. He had to keep pushing and pushing until he got his ire over whatever it was – an exploded outhouse, a grudge race between Jesse and Boss, burnt coffee and a girl he couldn't stand – out of his system.

"Just say it!" Bo demanded again, on his feet now and marching up towards where Luke stood on the other side of the bars.

A deep sigh, one that spoke of all the trials of dealing with an exasperating younger cousin, Luke's head dropping to stare at the cold concrete below his feet for a few seconds. Doing his counting probably, clenching his jaw, and then his head lifted, bright blue eyes staring right into Bo's.

"You just need to think more, is all," was the fine advice from his big cousin. "You get—you fall in love," those last two words choking out like Luke hated them, and maybe he did. Love wasn't a topic Luke was terribly fluent in. "Too easy. You're always in a hurry. You rush in—"

"Maybe you're too slow," Bo countered. "Maybe you're too busy hedging your bets and thinking that you never give the girl no good reason to want to be with you. I feel sorry for you, Luke. Don't know why any girl would want to stay with you."

A solid nod, accepting when his cousin should have been fighting.

"Maybe so," Luke agreed. "I can't say that part ain't true. But at least," and somehow, agreeing was worse. It was all those tight muscles in Luke's jaw moving down into his throat until his words sounded all choked and raw. "If they don't stay with me, they also don't try to take me away from my family. I'm about dang sick of almost losing you."

It was awfully hard to think of an answer to that, so Bo didn't. He just nodded his head and moved back to sit on his cot again.


	19. One Hell of a Risk

**Chapter Nineteen - One Hell of a Risk**

It wasn't a surprise, wasn't meant to be a surprise, really. It was just his plan working like whatever clockwork could work in a town like Hazzard where no two clocks ever said the same thing anyway. It was noise overhead, moving and swelling until it was on the stairs, thumps and bumps and raised voices, and then it was there in front of them.

Or they were there in front of them, not just one, but two. Boss, beady-eyed and surly, puffing out the smoke of frustration and righteous anger at how he'd been defied. By Jesse, equally as beady-eyed (though there might just have been a touch of moisture there at the corners) and surly.

"They got a right to counsel," seemed to be some sort of leftover words from the argument that had brought the two men down here.

"They got a right to go straight to the federal penitentiary," was just a petulant brat that wasn't going to get his way. A wave of a cigar-bearing hand in the air was merely giving in to the inevitable. _Go ahead and counsel them._ Just, it was going to happen in public, because Boss wasn't going anywhere. He couldn't keep Jesse out like he'd wanted to, the sheer force of the man's need to be near his boys was too strong to be overcome. But Boss had his own brand of stubbornness, and if Jesse was going to be down here, so was he.

Which didn't much matter, as Jesse commenced to ignoring him. Took the two steps over from the entryway to be standing equally in front of both cells.

"We-ell," he said. Came out as two syllables, sounded almost like _whale_. Echoed like thunder and lightning, had the ring of whipped hides. Called into question their intelligence and their sanity without ever getting beyond just that one uttered word.

Rheumy old eyes, slightly squinted on the one side, looking them up and down. Bo first, maybe checking for bruises or broken bones, for signs that he'd managed to get himself hurt even if he hadn't gone off and made that crazy old thirty-two car jump.

(Luke could see, now that the immediate danger of the stunt had passed, why Bo might have been surprised that he had absolutely no support for trying it. Sure, Jesse hated every jump they'd ever done, even the safe ones. But Luke had always been there at Bo's side, laughing and halfway cussing his cousin for a fool, riding shotgun and pooh-poohing any fears their kin might have had about the risk involved. Still, this time had been different, and maybe, just maybe, Bo had halfway worked his way around to understanding why.)

Seeming satisfied with the lack of obvious blood or otherwise broken parts on his younger nephew, the oldster's eyes turned to Luke. Deep study there, serious thoughts behind that look. Chin tipping down, and Jesse could turn skeptical, simple as that. Assessing, looking deeply pensive. Raised eyebrow went straight to the heart of the matter without even a word needing to be said. About how there had been no moonshine orders waiting to be fulfilled when he and Daisy had headed off to Cedar City last night, and no reason at all for Luke to have been out in Tilly with a few jugs in the back seat. Tiny tip of the head toward Bo contained the admonition that somehow or other, he'd brought Bo in on his foolishness.

"It's better than watching the two of you fight," was Jesse's final assessment of their current predicament. "Stay put," he added, like they had any option, like what the small confines of the jail needed right now was a little Duke wit.

Then their uncle was turning on his heel, marching back toward the stairs with J.D. Hogg trotting right behind and demanding answers about what kind of counsel that had really constituted anyway.

* * *

><p>He should have expected it, probably. How that endless look that Luke had endured, not a glare, but not exactly gentle either, would have negative consequences.<p>

Quiet from over there. Not that it had been exactly noisy before Jesse got here, but it hadn't been the same. That quiet was more about the two of them nursing female-inflicted (and self-inflicted, because the conclusion they seemed to come to was that they were equal idiots when it came to girls) wounds. This one felt more like danger, like some sort of storm building inside Luke. Thing was, Bo couldn't see the clouds, so it was hard to tell whether it'd be a little refreshing rain or a tornado set to tear the whole courthouse apart.

"Well," he offered. Smiled, because no one, not even Luke in a foul mood, could resist such a thing. "He made it."

Rustle of clothes, might have been a shrug. Luke retreating to the corner furthest from Bo, sitting on the cot there.

"For all the good it'll do," got mumbled back at him.

The last twenty-four hours had been hard. Bo could admit that, he could see where he hadn't made them any easier. But they'd survived them, and they were together. Didn't seem like too much to ask that Luke's outlook could get a little less gloomy. "What's that supposed to mean?" he asked.

"Bo." He had a short name (or at least the name he was willing to be called was short). Didn't take much of any time at all to say it, just the one syllable, easy to pronounce and there wasn't a whole lot of room in there for inflection. So there shouldn't have been a way for him to know, but that _Bo_ that Luke had just said, well it didn't sound like a good _Bo_. "You wasn't supposed to get yourself arrested."

So he'd been told, over and over again. He'd tried to make a joke of it and laugh it off, but there it was again. Luke never could let up, he just kept right on beating that same old horse, long after it had given up the ghost.

"You needed me," he reminded Luke. After all, it wasn't the sort of thing that happened every day. Maybe it was more than his oh-so-independent cousin wanted to admit, but it was a memorable thing to Bo. "You sent Enos out to find me because you didn't have no one else to call. I tried to help you out," and maybe it hurt a little bit that Luke didn't seem to appreciate what Bo had given up for him. Yeah, the girl had turned out to have mixed-up priorities, but he could have stayed with her. The carnival had turned out to be in hock, but if he'd stayed, it would have brought in enough money to pay off the loan to Boss, and he would have had himself a pretty good job. Driving a car for a living was better than working at the mill by far. Luke ought to know that – they'd both been doing it their whole adult lives. Now he had none of it. No girl, no job, no crowds to scream his name in excitement and delight, and it would just seem that Luke would be the smallest bit thankful over what he'd walked away from. "But it didn't work out. What else was I supposed to do?" Maybe rob the bank to get bail money? But that would have led to him being here anyway. He would have had to be sure to steal enough to pay both of their bail.

"You was supposed to stop long enough to listen to me," Luke informed him. "You wasn't supposed to go running off to Diane." The name was practically spat at him. "You was supposed to go off to Cedar City looking for Jesse and Daisy. But you never follow the plan. Always figuring it'll all come out the same if you improvise."

Wait. "What? Luke," it had been an endless night. He was tired, he was hungry again. He was sick of being trapped in this little cell, too close to his cousin and too far away. His brain felt like molasses on a December morning, and he had a little headache right there between his eyes, but he might just have figured something out. Could have been there was a little glimmer of light shining through the cracks of Luke's logic. "Are you saying it wasn't part of the plan for me to get arrested—"

"—Ain't you the quick one," interrupted him, but he wasn't willing to be distracted, not now.

"—But it _was_ in the plans for _you_ to get arrested?"

Silence from over there on the cot. Funny thing about Luke, how he could bend the rules of honesty until they were just about broken. But this little trick or declining to answer would only work if Bo let it. So he planted his hands on his hips and stood there, eyebrow cocked, waiting. Felt a cramp wend its way up his calf and into his thigh, but he held his ground.

A tiny little fidget over there on the cot. Small enough that Luke might have passed it off as nothing more than scratching an itch, but only to someone who wasn't Bo, who hadn't sat next to him through lectures and threats of whippings, who didn't know all his little mannerisms. One finger moving, then his whole hand clenching, then a sudden jerk as he ran his hand through his hair with barely contained violence.

"Luke," Bo said, because now there would be no holding back. All that stubborn resistance had worn itself out. "Did you send Jesse and Daisy off so you could get yourself arrested without them interfering?" And so Bo would be the only one left to come to his rescue.

Those exhausted blue eyes came up then, meeting his. There might have been a shrug to follow, but he couldn't swear to it. Not that he needed words or even gestures at this point. Luke looking at him was enough.

"That was one hell of a risk," Bo informed him. Because as of this morning's sunrise, he'd been perfectly willing to walk away from his family, to leave Luke to his own devices. He reckoned he might get to missing his kin after a while, but he'd been quite sure that the carnival could provide him with a happier life than anyone in Hazzard could. And Diane was a much better companion than Luke. Not only was she prettier, but she was nicer and furthermore, not half the schemer that Luke was.

And this scheme right here was the granddaddy of them all. His too-smart cousin had managed to do exactly what he'd wanted to all along. He'd tricked Bo out of doing the jump.

Maybe he ought to be angry about that. (Maybe it would have been a lot easier to holler at Luke if he didn't look so pathetic over there.) Maybe it didn't matter that his cousin had turned out to be at least halfway right about Diane, and she wasn't quite as innocent as she'd seemed. Maybe he was about dang sick of not being trusted.

Then again, he was even more sick of the way his family had been divided. And he didn't figure that anyone had ever been as big a fool as Luke in his experience, but then again, no one else had ever sacrificed quite so much for him before.

"Come here," he commanded, walking up to the bars. Stood there a second while his cousin did the math of whether he was willing to take orders right now, and just how bruised his face already was, versus how black and blue it would be in another minute. But eventually Luke stood and met him halfway. Just the other side of the bars between them and watching him warily.

Bo reached out and snagged an arm around the back of his neck, pulling him forward to meet forehead-to-forehead like he had hours ago. _You're an idiot_, he'd said then, and it was true. Might be even more true now, and it was what Bo meant to say again.

"I've missed you," come out instead. Sounded stupid, maybe, but it was true.

Luke's hand came through the bars to wrap around his shoulder in a pathetic, bar-impaired hug. A little nod where their foreheads were still pressed together and, "Me too," his cousin admitted.


	20. A Better Outcome Than Tears

_**Author's Note: **As this story starts to wind down, you'll notice that canon begins to creep back in. _

_And just a reminder that I own none of these people (and this time I mean _none_ of them, because I don't think there was a single original character in the bunch) and make no money from borrowing them, though I do have fun! Hope you do, too. Thanks for joining me on this ride._

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter Twenty - A Better Outcome Than Tears<strong>

"You ain't Agent Roach." It wasn't, probably, the smartest thing to say to a man who had gotten past Boss and down here to the cells, which meant he had to have a badge. Even if the guy didn't look like any manner of law enforcement that Luke had ever seen and he seemed like the sort that would more quickly throw his hands up in surrender than brandish a revolver, he was on the free side of the bars to Luke's trapped and probably ought to be respected based on that much alone.

"No," the man answered in a prissy little voice. "I'm not." A puff on his pipe, the sort that made him look more like a professor than a lawman of any kind.

"Well then, what are you doing here?" All right, so when the footsteps had come down the stairs, the Duke boys had expected to see a disappointed uncle, a sheriff just about kee-kee-ing himself to death, or a revenuer. It was awfully hard to wrap his brain around this man whose presence didn't make any sense at all. Still, there was such a thing as manners.

"Bo Duke," his cousin said, sticking his hand out through the gap between the bars in proper greeting. Yeah, Luke should have done that.

"John Zimbra," the man answered him back. "And you're Luke Duke," he added, nodding a hello from where he stood.

"Have we met?" came out painfully polite and ice cold. Bo would complain that he was too suspicious, and maybe he was. Then again, they were in the miserable, dank basement of the Hazzard County Courthouse, waiting on a revenue agent to set bail then haul them off to someplace worse while their kin was upstairs doing – well whatever it was that they were doing, it had to involve Boss Hogg so it couldn't be good. Luke reckoned he had good enough reasons for skepticism.

"In a way," the man answered, then gripped the pipe between his teeth so he could reach into the pocket of his suit coat. Not a standard outfit for anyone but a banker, Luke would guess, and he couldn't imagine why anyone who worked in finances would want anything to do with two caged Dukes. "I wanted to talk to you last evening." _Last evening_. The man was not from around here and that was all there was to it. "But you ran me off the road."

The blue Plymouth that had been tailing them on their way home from the fairgrounds.

"Then you are a revenue agent. Where's Andy?"

"I'm afraid," nope, definitely not from around here. Anyone who'd ever run moonshine or met anyone who did would have the smarts to figure out that it was the guys on the inside of the bars that had a reason to be afraid, not the guy on the outside. "I don't know who you're talking about. Like I said, I'm John Zimbra," and he pulled a little, black wallet out of that suit pocket, flashed an identification card at him, then put it back. "I'm a special investigator from Southern Counties Insurance Company; we hold the liability policy on the Carnival of Thrills. I wanted to talk to you yesterday about the string of incidents they've had, but you weren't too helpful about that."

Luke rubbed at the back of his head and tipped it down. Smiling at the concrete beneath his feet, because it wasn't nice to be prideful and smug about his driving abilities. Not when the person he'd stranded in the sugar sand in Possum Hollow was a perfectly-pressed little professor type that probably got squeamish if he had to push his car faster than fifty-five.

"Incidents?" came from Bo's side of the basement. "What incidents?"

"Crashes," Zimbra clarified. "There have been three previous crashes, all doing the same stunt."

"The Leap for Life," Luke finished for him. Thought, a little too late, that he shouldn't have, that it would have been better to let Zimbra say it or let Bo work it out for himself.

"That's right, son. Do you know anything about it?"

He hesitated then. Considered what his gut had been nagging him about all this time, and the pitifully few facts he had. Thought about his cousin and the way Bo had accused him of seeing the worst in everything. Figured there was only one answer he could give.

"No," he admitted, and it was as much as confessing to murder. He knew nothing at all, had goaded and belittled and hit Bo over nothing more than suspicion. "We saw what happened in Cedar City, though. It was a pretty hairy accident."

"If it was an accident," Zimbra corrected. "What about you?" he asked Bo.

"I—" Bo started, got stuck. Tried again, didn't get any further.

"Think, son." In spite of himself, Luke kind of liked the prissy, overdressed, pipe-smoking professor fellow. He wasn't even slightly subtle, didn't fit in anywhere, didn't have any bravado or toughness at all, and yet he was an investigator. Halfway inept but earnest, and it was hard not to like someone like that. "Is there anything at all you can tell me about the Carnival? About Miss Benson?"

"Diane?" Bo defended, sounding pretty much the same as he had since the day he'd met her. Ready to fight for her honor, but Luke wasn't sure that she had any. "What's this got to do with her?" Defiant, angry.

"Well, son," Luke liked the man, the way he stood his ground even if Bo had a good foot on him and a good fifty pounds, too. But he reckoned this Zimbra fellow ought to stop calling them 'son.' He wasn't their father, didn't have the first idea about their fathers (or maybe he did, he was an investigator after all, and it didn't take too much work to find out that the Duke kids' parents were buried in the Hazzard Cemetery) and how the word 'son' wasn't anything they'd grown up hearing. "Each of those men that crashed was involved in an affair with her at the time it happened."

And there it was. All of Luke's gut feelings about her confirmed. The woman was no good. He ought to feel triumphant, and maybe he'd get around to that. When Bo's shoulders stopped slumping, maybe, or when he quit looking at the gray of the floor with quite so much concentration.

"I don't know what caused the crashes," his cousin mumbled. Lifted his chin, his eyes a mite too wet for Luke's liking. "But I don't reckon Diane had anything to do with that part. She didn't ever get too close to the cars. She didn't know a ton about them. That stuff got left to Carl and the hired hands. She mostly," came out as a wry attempt at humor, "stuck close to me."

* * *

><p>Luke and Zimbra talked, trading theories and thoughts. Bo figured his input wasn't really needed anymore, so he left the scheming to the schemers. Looking for the worst in people, and it didn't matter that Luke had been right about Diane. (All right, it mattered. And it changed some things, it changed the way he thought about the girl. One girl, one person, he was willing to admit, had not been as innocent as she might have projected herself to be. But he wasn't going to go through life expecting everyone to be that way. Luke and Zimbra could do that to their heart's content without any help from him.) He had nothing to contribute to that conversation.<p>

"I don't have any proof of anything," Zimbra was saying when the thumping and bumping started up over on the metal stairway again. "But when it happens just about the same way, three times in a row—"

"I don't like it one bit," Boss was saying from the stairwell. Could have been the end of Zimbra's sentence, except it wasn't. It was pure indignation.

"Well, then," Jesse was answering back. "I reckon it's a good thing we didn't ask you."

The basement of the Hazzard Courthouse lacked for reasonable acoustics, all bare cinderblock walls and metal bars. It echoed and rattled under quiet conditions. Get all these people down here and it was a cacophonous mess of Zimbra, Jesse and Andy Roach introducing themselves to each other, and Boss, who either knew everyone or didn't care to, shouting over them all about how little he liked it. Whatever _it_ was and Bo was prepared to love _it_ if only because of Boss' powerful negative reaction.

Luke got Zimbra and Jesse going, talking over conspiracy theories and how it could be that so many guys had gotten hurt in such a short span of doing the same exact stunt. Jesse might have figured that they were all fools to even try, but Luke and Zimbra were pushing him for anything he might have learned in Cedar City. Meanwhile Boss was loudly not liking any of this to Andy Roach, whose round face was pink with either annoyance or amusement. Bo couldn't tell which and he didn't really care either; as long as everyone's attention was elsewhere he could retreat a couple of steps to sit on his cot. To let his forehead rest on his hands and think. About the fool he'd been, chasing after Diane. What was it Daisy had called him? A love starved calf at feeding time. And he'd gone to her for sustenance when he hadn't really needed any. He'd been surrounded by the love of family – too tight, constricting and choking half the time, but then again those same arms that bound him were the ones that held onto him when he stumbled.

Thought about Luke and what an idiot he was. No way around it, his cousin was a grump most of the time and had almost no kind words to spare to anyone. He teased mercilessly because he didn't know how to say important things outright. _Go left_ might come out like a command that just about accused Bo of not having the brains to navigate the back roads of his own town, but then again, it could just as easily mean_ I love you and if you ever need me to, I'll sacrifice years of my life to prison to keep you alive_.

"Ev-er-y-bo-dy!" That was Jesse hollering over all the chatter, interrupting Bo's thoughts just before he got to feeling downright miserable. Silence, just like that, because even Boss's extreme dislike for whatever it was that made him so unhappy wasn't powerful enough to stand up to Jesse Duke's commands. "Stop. We can do all this socializing," as if words that got spoken through bars could ever be called small talk, "later. Right now, me and Andy got to talk to my boys. Now Mr. Zimbra, it was nice chatting with you, and if you want to go upstairs, you can talk to my niece, Daisy. She went with me to Cedar City and saw everything I did. She'll be the pretty one talking to the deputy." And making his face turn funny colors while sweat rolled down his temple.

"Dat," Boss began, because of all the things he was busy not liking, getting ordered around by Jesse Duke was one of them.

"Now J.D.," Jesse said with all the compassion in the world. "You just go on up there, too." Like he was talking to a five-year-old in a huff about not getting the lollipop he wanted, and maybe that wasn't so far off from the truth. "You just go on, now," their Uncle repeated, making exaggerated shooing gestures with his hands. "And see if you can't help Mr. Zimbra and Daisy up there."

Big brown eyes regarded Jesse, looking little-boy-brave and trying to stand his ground. Jesse just raised his eyebrows and tipped his head forward, giving his whole body a slight lean toward Boss Hogg. Cigar popped out of mouth to allow a pouting lip to follow, and the commissioner marched off in a snit. Quiet reigned for a few seconds to be sure he was gone, then Jesse came to the bars on Bo's side of the jail.

"Come here, boy," he commanded. The words sounded like a whipping all by themselves, and that was before taking into consideration the dark and serious countenance.

"Yes, sir," he answered out of habit and a keen desire to save his hide. Stood and shuffled a couple of steps toward the oldster.

"Closer," Jesse insisted and Bo could hear a little snicker from over Luke's way.

_Putting it off only gives him time to rest his arm_, his cousin might have said when they were kids. Luke always took his licks first, because he was bigger and all three of them knew that Jesse's arm got tired after the first whipping and the second one wasn't so bad.

Meaty hand through the bars when he got close enough, but it didn't hit him. Just grabbed his chin and turned it forward. "You all right, boy?"

Half of him wanted to shrug and kick his toe at the floor like he would have back in the days when whippings were more than a threat. But he wasn't a kid, he was a man. He'd walked right out on the man that raised him just twenty-four hours ago, announcing that the farm was too small for both Luke and him. If he was big enough to take up more than his share of the farm, he was big enough to face his uncle.

"Fine," he said, even if he wasn't. Because all he needed was a little time to readjust himself. To realize that what he'd lost was no more than a girl that he hadn't even properly met until this week. Didn't come close to what he'd nearly lost through his foolishness – family, home, the support of those who'd really loved him.

"All right, then. You boys is fools."

"Yes, sir," Bo answered. Luke just smirked over there. Tried to stay silent, but Jesse glared at him until he fidgeted.

"Yes, sir," he echoed.

"But you're my fools, and I reckon you're worth keeping around. Me and Andy there," and old Agent Roach was in his own corner, all but cowering against Jesse's tone. No one was ever safe from a Jesse Duke lecture. "Has worked something out. We's both going to get what we want from the deal, so I reckon it'll work out fine. But you boys need to be on your best behavior for the next few hours while we wait for paperwork to get driven up here from Atlanta."

"Yes, sir," Bo answered.

"What kind of a deal?" Luke asked, because he always had been nosybody, sticking his two cents in where they weren't asked for or needed.

"The kind of deal that gets you boys free. So you just hush up and behave. Don't give Boss no reason to tack on local charges. You got that?"

Yes, sir, he did. Whatever would get them out of the prison sentence they'd just about signed up for, he was willing to do it.

Luke was still skeptical over there, blue eyes studying Uncle Jesse like there was even half a chance of getting the old man to tip his hand. Jesse Duke never told a single thing that he didn't want to. But all that staring Luke was doing was precisely the kind of thing that led to whippings in the first place. Sassing with his eyes alone.

"All right," his cousin finally agreed. "If you need a bargaining chip with old J.D., I don't suppose Bo over there got his rights read to him. Did you Bo?"

"No, sir," he answered. Didn't quite smile – his heart wasn't ready to let him just yet – but he came close.

* * *

><p>It was, he knew, a temporary peace. One struck up between two boys that were so exhausted from feuding that they lacked the energy to actually agree to a truce – it just happened all by itself. They still had plenty to fight over, things to get mad about and then figure out how to come to peace with, but not now.<p>

Now was too tired for all of that, it was a sleepless night of worry followed by a day that had jumped the tracks a few times. Now was finding his way back to that piece of concrete to sit on, the one at the back corner, abutting Bo's cell. Now was closing his eyes, waiting for those dragging footsteps to follow him, the heavy drop of a body, a warm shoulder bumping against his through the gap in the bars. Now was opening his eyes to meet equally tired ones.

"What kind of an agreement do you reckon Jesse and old Andy came up with?"

Now was not about answering questions. Leastwise not that one, because Luke didn't have the first idea. Didn't like that he had no good answers and it was nagging at him every bit as much as it was at Bo.

So he shrugged. "You all right?" he asked instead.

"I reckon," came out unusually quiet for Bo. "I sure made a fool out of myself, didn't I?"

"You done a pretty good job," Luke agreed. "But I helped. Like Jesse always says, when we work together, ain't nobody that can beat us. I reckon we accomplished about as much stupidity as anyone ever could."

A little snort to his left. All those words they didn't have to say about the ways they'd pushed each other past their limits this time. Hard to forget where all their mistakes had led them, what with the cold, steel reality surrounding and between them. Jail had a way of making a man get honest with himself.

"I loved her, or thought I did. Now I ain't so sure."

_Anything that makes a man walk away from a family ain't love_, Luke had asserted to his uncle, over and over again. Funny how all that certainty he'd had just yesterday was gone now when Bo was sitting there next to him, his heart mostly broken.

"I reckon you felt something for her," he answered, shook his head against all the ways it sounded wrong. It had been a fierce battle – between him and Bo, between him and Diane. He'd won on all accounts, but the victory was about as fragile as the skim of ice on Hazzard Pond in early winter. Too easy to shatter it all to bits and fall into the bitter cold solitude underneath. "I reckon you felt a lot for her," he amended. Still couldn't bring himself to call it love, not when it had happened all in one day and then the boy had been ready to march out of their lives. "I reckon it ain't easy," he tried, but the sentence had nowhere to finish up, unless he told the truth. _I reckon it ain't easy to learn that she was a snake, that she wasn't good enough for you._ Couldn't say that so he said nothing, and it got quiet again.

Two years after Jill Dodson left for Macon, Luke still wasn't any good at tears. Or misery, at least not Bo's. Aunt Lavinia was still gone, Daisy and Jesse were upstairs, the Duke boys were locked away from the General, and Luke had no tricks up his sleeve.

"Luke," and here it came. "If we was to get an offer to go to NASCAR, would you go?"

What? "Did you get an offer?" Seemed to him that the carnival circuit was awfully far from NASCAR, and Diane's little circus hadn't even made it as far as the state carnival circuit. Bo hadn't gotten a chance to make his jump, but maybe that didn't matter. The boy could drive like no one else, and if there'd been a scout—

"No." Exasperated answer. "I didn't. But if I did, would you?"

"Why wouldn't I?" It had only been their life goal since they were skinny and spastic schoolboys.

"I don't know," Bo said. Fingers dusting at the knees of his jeans. "It just seems like maybe you'd be happier here at the farm. Riding horses and working the soil." _And_, he didn't say, _you didn't want to have any part of the carnival. You already let me leave without you once._

Nothing to do but sigh over all the things he'd done wrong, the hateful words that had passed between them and the punches thrown, the way he'd gone about convincing all of their family and friends that only an idiot would try the Leap for Life, and how he'd left Bo utterly alone. No wonder the boy had clung so tightly to Diane; she'd been the only one who had offered to stay at his side.

"Bo, you get some NASCAR scout interested in you and there ain't nothing that could keep me from going with you."

Tentative little smile at that.

He bumped his shoulder against Bo's. "Someone's going to have to give you a run for you money. I know ain't none of them NASCAR drivers halfway good enough to."

Bo bumped him back. "You ain't much more than halfway good enough."

This was the part where he'd always answered back in the past, smarted off and wound up challenging Bo to a backroad race. This time he reckoned he could smile and tolerate the braggart singing his own praises. It was, after all, a better outcome than tears.


	21. Dealing and Wheeling

**Chapter Twenty-one - Dealing and Wheeling**

The silence chipped away, one little piece at a time. The thumping shoes of heavy feet overhead, the ticking of lighter ones. Muffled voices and then there came a sigh from Luke, as if he wasn't looking forward to getting let out of here. Or he was chewing over all the things that he had a habit of worrying about. Then louder voices, including Jesse informing J.D. Hogg that there was no reason he needed to come down even one step, cowing the commissioner away from the basement of his own offices like only the Duke patriarch could. After that came was a click and a clack, then the last of the silence broke away and acquiesced to Daisy's squeal of joy as she made it to the bottom of the steps before any of the older, heavier men behind her.

"Bo," she hollered and ran to him first, even if it meant she had to go right past Luke without even acknowledging his presence. Half a hug through cold steel, and maybe he could understand it. His male cousin was slower about getting to the front of his cell, where he could be touched. Then there was the part where his whole family had halfway expected Bo to die in a fiery crash into a pile of cars right about now, and there was also the fact that he'd left home. Just about run away with the carnival like a little boy dreaming of joining the circus, and maybe she thought she'd lost him forever. Whereas Luke was stalwart and steady and no one figured on him going anywhere.

Or maybe it was more than that. Squint-eyed look passing from his female cousin to the male as she let go of Bo to take a step closer to that first cell. Luke nodded in answer, stuck an arm through the bars as a sacrificial body part and let her smack it. Hard enough to echo even over the rest of the noise down here, and Luke muttered a small _ow_ in response. Which might have been just to make her feel good about how strong she was or how he'd learned not to make her angry or whatever, except it wasn't. Not when Luke winced to match the grunt of pain.

"Don't you never do that again," she admonished, leaving it up to any listeners to figure out what she meant, but Luke seemed to know anyway. Nodded at her and swore he had no plans to do anything at all. Could have been talking about getting himself arrested or sending her off to another city on a wild goose chase or using all the hot water in the shower. Bo didn't know and he never would find out, either, now that the basement was all crowded with men.

"All right," Jesse roared, gruff and scary as he could make himself. For all that the man halfway resembled Santa Claus, he could growl like a bear when he was of a mind to. "Get them out of there."

Jingling keys and Enos stepped forward from where he'd been behind Andy Roach. Two lawmen and one riled uncle didn't exactly seem like a welcoming committee to him, but Bo was happy enough when the deputy stuck the keys into the lock on his cell door and turned them. Waited for the door to swing open and then the second wave of Daisy's hugs arrived like a freight train crashing into his chest.

"Wait," came from Luke over there where Enos was getting ready to turn him loose, too. "What's this deal you made?" with a wide finger pointing back and forth between Jesse and Andy Roach, accusing them of all manner of secrecy and scheming behind his back.

"We'll talk about that later, Luke," Jesse rebuked, then held out a hand to beckon Bo out of Daisy's arms and into the old man's own. "Enos, you just let him out for now," got said over Bo's shoulder as they hugged.

"No," Luke sassed back. Of course he did, he always had. Never did know when to leave well enough alone and accept a gracious offer when it came along. "Enos, don't."

Nervous, lip-licking deputy, eyes twice the size they ought to have been, fingers twitching in the air as he tried to decide what to do with those keys in his hand and Bo didn't blame him one bit. In between Luke and Jesse was no place to be, not when they were bucking against each other for dominance. In fact, Bo stepped out of Jesse's hug and off to the side, because he didn't want to get caught up in this little showdown, either.

"Not until I know what kind of deal got made for my freedom."

"Luke," Jesse tried, but it was pointless. Whatever privacy the old man might have wanted to preserve had to be given up to the mulish ways of his older nephew. Besides, when it came down to it, Bo figured the only ones in this space who didn't already know what clever little pact had been made were him and Luke. A sigh; the oldster must have figured out that Luke had all the leverage here. Any Duke boy that wanted to stay in a jail cell pretty much had the permission of the law to do it. "Andy there agreed to lesser charges. You still got to go before the judge, but with the charges down from transporting illegal intoxicants to simple possession, you ought to get probation with no prison time."

"And," Luke asked, meaty hand up in the air to stay Enos, who had started to jingle the keys and move toward the cell door again. "What does Andy get in return?"

Leave it to Luke to count the teeth of horses that hadn't had any inclination toward biting him until he made it so easy.

"I get," the revenuer answered, fingers stroking across the few strands of hair stretched across the top of his head like they could hide the shine of bare skin underneath them if only they'd been arranged right. (Bo was tall enough to tell the man that there just wasn't enough hair left up there to bother with and he might just as well shave it all down to the nub.) "Peace of mind. And maybe I'll even be able to assign an agent to this region and have them stay for more than a couple of months at a time."

"Because?" Luke prompted. Head tipped slightly sideways, mildly curious and that was all. No need to worry about old Luke, he could stay in his cell until the sky fell or old men who thought they could hold back grew tired and got around to admitting things.

"Luke," Jesse snapped against little-boy, foot-stomping pig-headedness of the fool in the cell. "We ain't going to run 'shine no more is what he gets. We sign, he signs, and the charges get small enough that you ain't got to do no prison time. Now get out here."

Only idiots and men with thick hides would dare to disobey that tone of voice, but Luke thought about it. It was there in how his eyebrows came down, his lips mashed into a frown.

"Nope, no deal," he declared. "Enos, you just put them keys right back on your belt."

"You just listen to me, boy." It would be hard to whip Luke through the bars. There'd have to be some feat of strength and cooperation from Luke, or maybe it would take getting Enos to let the old man in the cell too, so there'd be no obstacles.

"Uncle Jesse." Luke didn't whine, would swear he had never whined a day in his life. But he did complain plenty with just the tone of his voice, and he was doing some mighty complaining right now. "You can't take that deal. If I got to do time, I'll do time. Moonshining has been the family heritage since—I don't even know when. We ain't got no other craft."

"Well, don't you think I know all that?" their Uncle charged. Walked right up as close as he could get to Luke with the bars in between. "But that don't matter to me none if you ain't home with us. You fool, you did all this so Bo wouldn't up and leave us. Do you really reckon it's okay for you to get your dang-fool self sent off to prison?" Silence, standoff. Two sets of blue eyes clashing, duking it out for dominance and eventually Luke's gave in. Dropped down to look at his feet or the concrete below them.

"No, sir," went to show how serious Luke was about it. His cousin almost never called Jesse _sir_ anymore. "I just ain't got no idea how we're going to make a living, is all."

"Well, farming," Jesse said with a shrug that pointed out how obvious the choice was. "We been doing half that job all our lives. Now we just got to do the other half." Which would mean harvesting and selling raw crops, and growing more than just corn. Wouldn't be easy, but he reckoned they could handle it if they all put their minds to it. "Now Enos, you get him out of there, or I'll tan your hide. Go on," Jesse encouraged, stepping back to make room for the deputy to get to the lock. Still, old Enos was too nervous to move, eyes flicking back and forth between Jesse and Luke. Ugly place to be, unfortunate choice to have to make, but Luke helped him. Waved a defeated hand through the air—_do what he says_—and dropped his head down again. Looked tired, looked old, maybe. Older anyway, not the same obstinate jackass that did chores at double time just to prove how big and tough he was.

Clank and rattle, the cage opened. Enos hid behind the door like the wild animal he was letting out might bite, but it didn't turn out that way. "Come here, boy," was Jesse's command that brooked no sassing and might have meant a whipping. Except it didn't, today it meant a hug and knowing his cousin Bo figured the whipping would have been more welcome, but Luke accepted what was offered, mumbled apologies that Uncle Jesse hushed before they could be explained.

"Ijit," interrupted what might have been a quiet family moment, Jesse welcoming home his two prodigal children. Gave them the excuse to separate to stand back and listen to the staircase echo under the weight of yet more people coming down here to squeeze into this tight space. Ducking out of the way, because Rosco P. Coltrane meant it, he was serious this time.

Shadows first, then bodies. Carl from the Carnival in the lead, limping the same as he always had, just a little more pronounced and the dirt on the knees of his pants spoke of some sort of struggle that he'd come out on the losing end of.

"Carl?" he blurted.

"Just move," Rosco was saying as he emerged from behind. "Just you move and don't you go threatening me neither." Glowering look back over his shoulder from Carl, but that was about all he could manage, what with how his hands were cuffed behind him. "You get in there now," Rosco menaced, steering Diane's right-hand man toward the open door of the cell Luke had just come out of. Enos swung it that much wider with a squeak of surprise at how quickly it was getting used again.

"What are you doing here?" Bo asked the man who was about to get locked up, his voice going high with surprise. Sounded like a kid in his own ears and he hated it. Hated the notion of sounding young and naïve in front of this man who had tried to warn him that life with Diane Benson wasn't as rosy as it looked at first blush.

"None of your business, kid," got grumbled back at him, then echoed by Rosco.

"It was," came the nasally voice from the bottom of the steps, Investigator Zimbra finally making his way into the crowded confines of the basement. The walls were sweating with the vapor of nine people clumped in close quarters. "Your cousin Daisy's information that led me back to the carnival." Zimbra's once tidy suit had matching dirt spots to Carl's jeans; looked like the two of them might have come to some sort of physical violence before the arrest could happen. "She told me that when she went to look at Bob Dexter's wrecked car from last week, she found the fuel line cut in a straight slice."

"That's right," Daisy agreed, her face glowing. If Zimbra had been a little younger and had more hair, she might have begun flirting with him, right then and there. As it was, her smile alone made him flush a healthy shade of pink. "It looked like it had been cut on purpose."

"It had been," Zimbra agreed, as Rosco locked Carl into the cell with a solid clang. Remembered to take the handcuffs off all by himself this time, unlike this morning when Bo had just about had to take them off of himself. Then again, he'd just about put them on himself, so it all evened out in the end. "And it was your information, young man, that made me not suspect Miss Benson. Seemed like she wouldn't know what a fuel line was to cut it. So I asked her who might have done it and—" She'd given up Carl, just like that. Hard to say whether that made anything better or worse. Couldn't even make up his mind whether what Diane had done constituted treason or a good deed or was just wisdom. Cutting Carl loose like the bad seed he was, and if she ever wanted a successful carnival, he didn't suppose she ought to keep harboring a bitter man who had just about gotten other men killed by cutting their fuel lines just because they got too close to his old girlfriend or his once-prized driving skills.

"Come on," Jesse was saying before he got around to making sense of the swirling thoughts in his brain. "Let's give these folks some privacy." Right, as if Carl, the law of Hazzard and Mr. Zimbra really needed to be alone together. "Besides," his uncle added, using one hand to grip around his upper arm while the other shoved at Daisy (and Luke was left to come all on his own, but he always did better if you didn't tug on him anyway), "you boys need to get to work."

"Work?" he asked as the four of them shuffled around to figure out getting up the stairs single file. "What work?"

"Well," Jesse answered, a smirk that Bo couldn't see because the oldster was behind him now, but it was perfectly clear in the tone of his voice. "I reckon someone needs to get on plowing that south forty. We got to get new crops planted back there before the fall rains come."

* * *

><p>They were, more or less, back where they started. Not in the fields, not today. Yesterday they'd done some plowing sown in a small crop of winter wheat, but there was only so much you could put in this late in the year. It wouldn't be easy, and they'd be eating plenty of beans and chicken, wearing last year's jeans and cutting back on nights out carousing, but they were just going to have to make the last of their liquor money stretch out until next harvesting season. A full year with no income.<p>

Unless another loophole could be found or offered to them. Andy Roach seemed pretty happy with the deal he'd already made, and Jesse was as good as his word, so it seemed unlikely that there'd be any more moonshining in the Duke line. It wasn't what he'd hoped to accomplish, not by a long shot. But you couldn't go looking back with regrets, you had to go looking forward with hope. At least that was what Jesse told him.

"_It wasn't supposed to work out this way," he'd sworn to the man who'd raised him as they sat, once again, over coffee cups in the dark of night. Despite threats that he and Bo would have to get straight to plowing the south forty when they got home from their little adventure in the jail, it hadn't worked that way. They'd been sent off to bed as soon as they'd finished the barn chores. Sure, it had only been late afternoon and they could have done some good in the hours before dark, but Jesse had been adamant, and Daisy had been on his side of it. All four Dukes had been up all night and needed some sleep right then and there. And they'd gotten it, at least for a few hours. But while the two youngest of the family slept on, he and Jesse had risen during the darkest hours, and due to some tacit agreement, had met in the kitchen over heaven in the form of coffee._

"_I ain't sure how else you figured getting yourself caught moonshining would go, Luke," came the rebuke. Still not half as angry with him as he wanted it to be. Not that a whipping would get them their craft back or make it any better that they'd have no income for the foreseeable future, but it might just have made it a little easier to live with himself. _

_The way it was meant to go ended with him in prison. For five years at most, he figured, what with it being his first offense and all. With good behavior he might have been out in half the time, but that wasn't important. He would have done ten years if that was what it took to keep Bo alive and away from the carnival. "You was supposed to leave me to the Feds," he explained. "And Bo wasn't supposed to get himself arrested, neither."_

_A tsk tidily explained what foolish thinking that had been. "Bo goes everywhere you go, except when he don't," was perfectly logical, from the old man's point of view. _

"_Yeah, well, he wasn't supposed to want to be anywhere near me. He was just supposed to go looking for you out of loyalty to the family."_

"_Luke," had sounded just like the beginning of a series of words that he wasn't going to want to hear. "He ain't never wanted to be too far from you. He just wanted you to accept him no matter what."_

"_I do that," he'd defended himself. After all, he'd put up with temper tantrums and foolish stunts all his life. "I just didn't like the way Diane was using him, was all."_

"_You just got lucky that she really _was_ using him. Admit it, boy, you didn't know for sure that she was." It was one of those rhetorical statements, he felt. Something that didn't require an answer because Jesse had already made up his mind on the subject and didn't see the reason for anyone to go contradicting him with facts now. "Luke, one of these days he's going to fall in love for real, and you're going to have to decide whether you want him in your life or out of it. You keep on finding flaws with every girl he wants to get close to, and eventually he's going to choose one of them over you. You got to make room in your heart for both him and whoever he falls for and means it, or you're going to lose him for real someday." Silence dragging on into eternity after that one. "And I wasn't never going to leave you in jail or let you get sent to prison, neither. You did a good thing, maybe the best thing you could do, making sure he didn't make that jump. I'd give up moonshining a hundred times just to have you both home, safe and alive. And," he'd added with a wink, "not fighting no more."_

_More silence after that, broken only by sips of long-gone-cold coffee out of the chipped lips of old mugs. _

"_You're a fool, boy, but I love you," had been Jesse's final words on the matter._

Which hadn't eased the burden on his mind one bit. Daisy had helped him a little bit with that, burning his food and starching articles of his clothing that scratched up against sensitive skin. She'd been direct, too, hollering at him about how he never should have done any such dang-fool thing and more than that, he shouldn't have kept her in the dark about it. "I would have helped you," she'd stormed, but he wasn't quite sure how she saw herself assisting him in his quest to get busted for running moonshine. Still, he accepted her angry little lectures and her warped sense of punishment, because it made sense to him. Someone ought to be trying to teach him a lesson after what he'd gone and done.

But somehow or other, the days were mostly progressing as they always had. Whatever ceremony Jesse had enacted as he'd dismantled the still in the woods had been kept private, and their court date wasn't for a couple of weeks yet. The fields could be left to themselves for now, so he and Bo were back out here at the edge of the property under watercolor gray skies, finishing that fence that they'd been working on a week ago. Whistling at first, but it gave way to huffing and puffing when the work got heavy, then catching their breath as Bo drew a gloved hand across his forehead. The thick leather didn't do much more than smear the sweat around, which gave them an excuse to stand still a little longer while Luke mopped his own brow with his newly-shucked shirt before offering it to Bo to do the same. Daisy would complain about the sweat and dirt ground into the cloth there, and then she'd starch another pair of his shorts. At least, he figured, some things would stay the same in their suddenly changing world.

Somewhere after he'd pointed to the rails that still needed to be pounded into place and mumbled something about getting to work, there'd come a rumble from the north. Might have been welcome were it thunder, giving them an excuse to take a break and bringing some cool rain to the soupy-hot air. But it didn't roll and crack, it just got steadily louder until it came around the bend in the form of a white RV.

They paused, both Dukes, to watch. Seemed a good enough excuse to prop his left elbow on Bo's shoulder, wondering all over again if he'd ever get used to having to reach up to do it. Their eyes traced the movement of the vehicle lumbering over dirt like a slow-moving elephant, kicking up dust behind. It was a book, one he might wish they'd never checked out, much less read, closing. He wasn't sorry to see that little orange star that adorned the back door getting smaller in the distance. Was about to nudge the two of them back to work, when Bo turned from where he'd been watching and buried his head in Luke's shoulder.

He never had been any good at handling tears, but he knew what it was like to lose someone, and he knew that the days without Bo in them had been an endless kind of miserable. He knew he hadn't helped then, hadn't given his cousin any good reason to want to be around him. He reckoned there were some things that he'd never been good at, but that was no excuse for not trying.

And it wasn't difficult, really, Bo had already done most of the work for him. Didn't take much to put his free arm around his cousin, to hug him like Lavinia would have. To rub at the back of that sweaty neck until Bo got himself calmed down like his mother might have, had she lived.

Knew enough to keep his mouth shut about how much better off his cousin was now that Diane was driving the rig right out of town, figured out how to laugh when Bo announced that if he ever wanted to finish the dang fence, he'd better turn him loose. Decided right then and there to let it go, to never again mention the fact that there'd been warm wetness on his bare shoulder, and set instead to digging and singing an old Eagles song until Bo joined in, harmonizing about life in the fast lane.


	22. In This Corner, Bo and Luke Duke

**_Author's note: _**_And another one comes to an end. Into canon and back out again, only to circle back. Eventually the boys have to get caught running moonshine, even if they get a few years' reprieve. And Diane Benson, for all that we can't stand her, has to come along and teach the boys that it is possible to lose each other, if they're too stubborn._

_As always, I don't own the Dukes or Hazzard, and earn noting for what I write about them. I am deeply thankful to everyone who had anything to do with creating the characters, from Gy Waldron to the writers to the actors and stunt people who brought them to life. And, of course, to the writers, readers and reviewers in fandom who talk Dukes and enjoy fleshing out the characters as much as I do._

_(This sounds like my usual farewell speech; it's not. I do have ideas on the front and back burners. More ideas than burners, actually. The brain isn't as malleable as it once was.)_

_Anyway, thanks to all for reading and for the conversations. And, in the immortal words of Cooter Davenport (amongst others), catch you on the flip side._

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter Twenty-two – In This Corner, Bo and Luke Duke<strong>

"Why did he do it?" blurted right out of his mouth, but then the thought had been banging around inside of him for most of the day. It would figure that it would work its way out of him one way or the other. Preferable to be having this conversation with Jesse on the porch than with Luke in the bedroom.

The fall, for all that it was life-changing, had been pretty unremarkable. Sure, things had gone whacky in town when Enos had flown off to Los Angeles to take his chances as a cop there, and Boss's cousin Cletus had stumbled into the role of deputy. Rosco had gotten himself a dog somewhere in there, and she might just have been the most intrepid officer on the sheriff's team.

The bang of the judge's gavel signaling the end of the Duke moonshing heritage (and consigning him and Luke to smaller boundaries than they were used to) hadn't much impacted the routine here on the homestead, aside from planting that small crop of winter wheat where the corn used to grow. Jesse looked a little older, his eyes a little sadder, but he'd moved with agility and strength that none of them had seen in a while to prepare the fields. He'd shrugged off any apologies that Bo had tried to make about the mess that his short tenure with the Carnival had created. "You was in love," Jesse swore and he didn't want to hear anything different, was deaf to any other considerations. Luke, he reckoned, got offered his own set of excuses for why the there was no reason for them to be sorry (even if there was). They had to live with what they had now, their uncle asserted. Each other, the land, their Duke blood.

Duke blood was a fine and noble thing, but his pride about what ran through his arteries was offset by him and Luke defending themselves against a giddy Boss Hogg on a near daily basis. Seemed the commissioner had happy little images of jailed Dukes dancing around in his head now that he'd gotten a taste of how it could be. But after years of running from revenuers, he and Luke didn't find old J.D. terribly intimidating.

Still, Boss was opportunistic, taking advantage of any mistake they made. Like Luke, on yet another relentlessly hot day that left them feeling like it was August instead of November, getting into a pointless fistfight in the Boar's Nest. Same kind they'd always gotten into, but now the stakes were higher. Broken valuables and Boss's new found power over them put everything they owned into jeopardy.

"It's scary, ain't it?" Yes, it had been. The only way out of jeopardy was for Luke to put on his scarred and scraped old boxing gloves and take to a ring in the middle of the town square, but he'd refused. Calmly, quietly refused; still, his eyes had given him away. Focused on nothing at all, oddly hollow and distant. He'd told tales of near-misses and sheer luck, then all but shut down into himself. Goading and harassment hadn't changed his stubborn Duke mind, until suddenly they had. Turning on a dime (or maybe a penny, they'd lost their primary source of income and couldn't afford to splurge on anything), he'd taken the fight. Trained for it, taken some practice swipes at Cooter, and then when today came, he'd stood there in the ring and taken as much of a beating as that big old, hard-hitting Catfish Lee could dole out. Hit and bruise after welt, and he'd just stood there, barely defending himself as his face swelled and parts of it went purple. It had been very scary. "When you learn the power you have over other people."

"What?" He was going to have to do something about that tongue of his. It kept right on saying things without waiting for permission.

"I reckon you spent your whole life thinking it went one way – you bending to Luke's will. You ain't never stopped to figure out how often he bends to yours." The oldster took a moment to study the horizon and sip at his coffee. "Now that you know you got power over him, you got to more careful how you wield it."

"Uncle Jesse, I ain't never had no influence over Luke." Such a notion was preposterous enough to make him emit a choked little laugh. The oldest of the cousins was decisive to the point of obstinacy. He came to his own silent little conclusions then acted on them without even consulting anyone, much less accepting advice or input.

"I don't suppose you see it or would recognize it for what it was, even if you did."

"See what?" He saw everything. How Luke pushed and shoved until he got what he wanted, the way he laughed at or lectured anyone who resisted him.

Another sip of the coffee, as if the old man could hide his smirk behind the lip of a mug. A pause to do some more staring at nothing at all, and then, "I don't reckon it's your fault. When things has been a certain way your whole life, you come to where you take it for granted." This was just the warm up. A little wisdom before the story-telling, some sort of parable that he'd nod and yes-sir to, but it never would make a lick of sense. All the same, foot-shuffling impatience had never gotten him anywhere good, not when his uncle had something to say that he figured was important. "You got to remember, Luke ain't had no role models, neither. His parents ain't here any more than yours is. Still, from the first day you boys ended up here, he's been trying to take care of you. Looking after you and acting like he was your mama and your daddy all at once. Trying to protect your heart when he ain't got the first idea how to take care of his own. I reckon he's made plenty of mistakes, but you got to remember, he's young. I know you think you's both all growed up, but you ain't nothing more than wet behind the ears. You're a fine pair of fools." Another sip of what had to be a nearly drained mug of coffee while Bo looked at the old and splintering boards beneath his feet. He and Luke really did need to get out here and replace some of the worst-rotted wood, but it would have to wait for a better day. "Sometimes he's a jackass in how he goes about it," Jesse admitted. "But that boy is always trying to do his best by you."

"I ain't never asked him to look after me," Bo defended, but it was weak, what with how he wasn't looking his uncle in the eyes.

"No one did. I reckon it was just something he felt he ought to do. And you ain't never much minded him doing it, either. Now, I know he's a stubborn fool. He comes by it honestly; he's a Duke, the same as you." Another long pause to let that soak into his brain, to let it stew. "He makes up his own mind about things. But if you don't figure that you needling him about taking the fight had something to do with him getting in the ring today, well you're just fooling yourself." To let it marinate until it totally saturated his thoughts, until it hurt to think about anymore. "Where is old Luke, anyways?"

Lying down on his bed, and the sun hadn't even set yet. It was unheard of, really. Luke Duke stayed on his feet until even the stars were getting tired of shining and were considering relenting to the sun again. It was one of those things, like the chickens and goats, the grass and the trees and the General Lee parked on the dirt patch out front – just a part of life here on the farm. "Resting," Bo admitted. It had, after all, been a nearly endless day. There'd been the morning of training, the afternoon of rescuing Luke from men who'd kidnapped him to prevent him from boxing, then the fight itself.

Finally there'd been chasing down the money that rightly belonged to Hazzardites, but had been stolen by Catfish Lee and cohorts. Two Duke boys driving in pointless loops, looking for lost loot, until they'd figured out that south was the way to go. Everything after that had been speed and dust and finally Luke pointing out where their quarry was hiding, in the old, condemned barn. It had been his older cousin that had gestured at the ramp, that had lined up the jump and encouraged him to make it. It wasn't thirty-two parked cars, it was bigger than that. A barn, and Luke had never complained or flinched, he'd just let Bo and the General have at it. _If the odds was even_, Luke had said to him as they'd wasted most of a day in jail, _I'd sit right there in the passenger seat and make the jump with you_. Today he'd made good on that little promise.

"He says he's got a headache."

"I imagine he does," Jesse mused. "That was quite a beating he took." The old man turned then, handing Bo his empty mug so he'd have two hands free to pull himself out of that half-decrepit swing that sat so low to the ground. "I reckon I'll go see to the evening chores now," he said. "You just go on in and put that cup in the sink. I reckon both of you boys has done enough work for one day."

Bo was not one to sass his uncle or to disobey orders. The screen door screeched a complaint as he pulled it open and went back inside, then slammed its disapproval at the manhandling. Bo ignored it – it wasn't like the door had ever had anything nice to say anyway – set the cup in the sink and grabbed a bottle off the top of the refrigerator before heading off to the bathroom. He dug in the medicine cabinet until he found the aspirin bottle, then dumped a couple of powdery pills into his hand. Took the little cup from beside their toothbrushes, filled it with water, and headed off to his own bedroom.

"You ain't fooling no one," he announced to his cousin, lying flat on his back in those gray sweats he'd changed into, a towel draped over his face.

"I ain't trying to," Luke answered back. "I wasn't pretending to sleep."

"No," Bo agreed. "You was pretending you didn't hurt half as much as you do." He settled the bottle and cup on the table between their beds, then swatted at Luke's ankle.

"Bo," came the complaint.

"Just move your feet over," he answered back. Sure, hitting any part of Luke was probably a bit cruel right now, but at no time had Catfish Lee landed a punch anywhere near Luke's feet. Whatever injuries and pain his cousin had were higher than that.

Luke did as he was told, and Bo sat on the edge of his bed. Grabbed one of those meaty hands in his, and set the aspirins in it. "Take them," he commanded. "There's water on the table next to you."

Funny how, for a man who gave so many orders, Luke didn't take them particularly well. Or at least he didn't take them without moving the towel first so he could give Bo a dirty look that silently called him all manner of names.

"I said take them, Luke. I ain't going to leave you alone until you do."

"Fine," got groused back at him, followed by Luke popping the chalky little pills into his mouth and leaving the water where it sat. Either he dry swallowed them or he was fool enough to suck on them like candy. Either way, Bo figured the benefit would get into his bloodstream eventually. "Happy now?"

Not quite. He let loose with a big old smile, anyway; the kind that disarmed unsuspecting girls and seasoned revenuers alike. Never had worked on Luke a single time in his life, but it didn't cost him anything to try.

Bo reached up to the table again, picked up the bottle and showed it to Luke. Jesse's other secret recipe, the one that smelled like poison but felt like heaven on sore muscles: cinnamon balm. A moan from Luke, but Bo wasn't even halfway planning on taking that for an answer.

"Turn over," he prompted, tugging the cork out from where it had been jammed into the bottle's mouth with excess force. A little cough when it popped free, filling the room with that overwhelming stench. "Best if you just do what I say, Luke. If you make me fight you, I ain't going to pull none of my punches," he threatened.

Luke's eyebrows came down, only so far, because there was that bruise next to his eye that had to hurt, getting pulled on like that. Cross little look, but he didn't mean it. Not when he was grunting his way up to leaning on his elbows, head shaking all the way. "You got a funny way," his cousin muttered, sitting all the way up, then turning to figure out the least painful way to lay back down on his belly. A few shuffling movements to fix his sweat pants from where they'd gotten twisted, then he settled. "Of showing your gratitude for the way I saved the farm."

"Yeah, well," Bo said, pouring a small amount of the liniment onto his hands and rubbing them together. Could feel the tingle of numbness already and he hadn't even begun to spread it onto Luke's back yet. "You might just as well get used to my funny ways." He started low, heard the hiss as he put too much pressure on already sore muscles. "I reckon I'm going to stay funny." If, that was, you considered him taking the time to take into account the consequences of his actions funny. And maybe it was, maybe he'd never thought about the limbs Luke went out on for him, maybe he'd fallen for all that bravado and the notion that they'd never break.

"Just," Luke warned him between grunts as Bo figured out exactly how hard to rub to make the muscles in Luke's back start to relax instead of tensing up all over again. "Don't make me laugh. I ain't sure I could stand it." So Bo shut his mouth and let his hands do the work for him. They were more reliable anyway.

The whole family had taken the time to prepare Luke for the fight, Daisy preparing high-protein foods while Bo yelled at him to run just one more mile, then Jesse had massaged him. They'd all shouted encouragement from the ringside throughout the fight itself, but none of them had taken the time to ask if he was all right afterward, or to thank him for going against his principles long enough to beat on a man who hadn't been his enemy. Dukes' tongues were foolish, but their hands were steady after years of sowing and tilling, cooking and bottling and driving along dirt paths in the dark of night.

Quiet, no more mumbles or grumbles, and though his fingers were mostly numb, Bo could feel how the body underneath them had relaxed. So he wiped his hands off on his own jeans, stood and capped the old liniment bottle. Considered taking it back to the kitchen, but put it on the table instead because they'd need it again in the morning, he suspected. Tiptoed across boards that couldn't be trusted not to squeak under his weight, and looked through the dusty window of their shared bedroom, out across the greens and browns of land they'd grown up on, fading to grays in the failing evening light. Saw a shadow, heavyset but strong, steady, and endlessly forgiving, out by the barn. He pulled the curtains closed, though it was almost dark enough outside not to matter anymore.

"Good night, Luke," he whispered to his sleeping cousin before sliding out the door to see if Jesse needed any help with the last of the evening chores.


End file.
